Look over your own life, and its course will have been determined in part by factors outside your control (Did you lose your job through no fault of your own? Were you born into poverty? Or with a genetic predisposition to depression?). But it will also have been shaped by decisions for which you are responsible, where you were at a crossroads and selected a path. Either this road, or that one. These are the decisions through which we invent ourselves. They express and give form to the fundamental projects that provide our lives with meaning and direction.32 Such projects – what Frankl called ‘concrete assignments’ – are different for everyone, and might include anything from promoting theatre for children or making scientific discoveries to caring for stray animals or keeping the family business going. We affirm their importance to us through our choices.
Despite all the upbeat self-help manuals that confidently urge us to get out there and make bold decisions, there is nothing easy about making choices. In his 1946 essay Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre tells the story of a pupil of his who sought his advice during the war. The young man was torn between looking after his mother, or joining the Free French Forces to fight the Germans and avenge his brother’s death. He was sure that remaining with his mother would have a beneficial effect on her life, but wasn’t certain if volunteering to fight would make much difference: he could end up stuck in a training camp and never see action. What should he do in the face of this excruciating dilemma? Should he choose the love of his mother or the love of his country?
Sartre’s answer was probably the most annoying response in the history of modern philosophy, but undoubtedly profound: ‘You are free, therefore choose.’ That was it. The young man could weigh up the reasons for and against on either side for as long as he liked, and seek advice from many quarters, but in the end it was up to him to make a decision. There was no escape: he must stare into the abyss of possibilities and simply make a choice. The final decision had to come from within himself. ‘Man is condemned to be free,’ wrote Sartre.33 The reality of freedom is that there are no excuses and we must take responsibility for our actions, knowing that for every path we choose others must be rejected. If this causes anguish, so be it. That is the nature of the human predicament. That’s the trouble with freedom.
This story, which is central to the existentialist canon, makes freedom of choice sound rather melodramatic. It isn’t always so. Sometimes the choices before us are not impossible ethical conundrums that leave us writhing in anguish no matter what we do. They could be relatively small but still significant decisions: how we treat colleagues in a meeting or someone needing help on the street, whether to make time to join a choir or play with our children. These are all instances of carpe diem possibility. There are bigger decisions too that are not about facing profound moral dilemmas like Sartre’s pupil, but simply involve confronting a difficult choice and finding the courage to act. Let me give a personal example.
I once had a job running a community project collecting stories of personal change. Although great to start with, after a few years my enthusiasm began ebbing away. I felt I wasn’t learning much any more, and that I had become an administrator spending most of my time answering emails. I was turning up and going through the motions, but became increasingly desperate to leave. Meanwhile, I had been cooking up a one-day, some-day, alternative plan: to start teaching my own courses on the art of living. But I just couldn’t see how to make it happen. It was financially risky and, having never done it, I had no idea whether I’d be any good at it. My partner encouraged me to leave my job but I kept up coming with excuses, for instance that even if I did leave, I had nowhere to hold the workshops I was planning. After three months of my complaining and procrastinating, she said, ‘You don’t need to resign yet. Why don’t you just start teaching your courses in our kitchen on the weekends?’
Her suggestion jolted me into action. That night, in a moment of carpe diem enthusiasm, I sent out an email to a few friends, and friends of friends, inviting them to a course on rethinking our attitudes to love and time, although I had only the vaguest idea of what I’d actually teach. Two Saturdays later, they turned up and we sat in our kitchen, eight people squeezed around the table. It was a great success, so I repeated the experiment with different topics, like work and empathy. As the kitchen workshops grew, people heard about them and I was soon invited to hold them for the wider public at a cultural centre. Within a few months the courses were going so well that I plucked up the courage to leave my day job and embark on a new career running workshops and writing about the challenges of how to live. It later led to me being a founding faculty member of The School of Life, an organisation that began in London and now has branches around the world.
My first kitchen workshop in 2007. I didn’t really know what I was doing.
The decision to run that first workshop was a turning point in my life, taking it in a radically new direction. But just as important was how I felt about it. I remember the excitement and exhilaration I felt after sending out that very first email invitation. It was a sense of absolute freedom – along with a feeling of relief, and a little anxiety too. Finally I had made a choice and become the author of my own life. Even though I had fears about whether I could pull it off, I felt released from the shackles of my indecision. I experienced what I can only describe as an internal glow of aliveness. It was a feeling that returned the evening after my inaugural workshop. I sat alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by leftover coffee mugs and Post-it notes, consumed by a heady lightness of being.
‘In every action,’ wrote Dante, ‘what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, is the disclosure of his own image… in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified.’34 Dante understood the philosophy of ‘I choose, therefore I am’. When we make a meaningful choice we experience an intensification of our being. Some call it the thrill of choosing. Even when accompanied by trepidation, it can fill us with a sense of vitality in body and mind. It is the process through which we discover that existence lies in agency. The fact that a choice might be difficult shouldn’t be a deterrent. Imagine if all our decisions were as easy as choosing whether to have strawberry or vanilla ice cream, or worse if all the significant decisions were made for us. Life would lose its lustre. Our humanity would be diminished. We should embrace hard choices as a creative space where we are given an opportunity to write the script of our own lives.35
Staying true to the carpe diem ideal requires developing a heightened consciousness of the choices before us, rather than sleepwalking our way through life. Camus may have put it best: ‘Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.’36 It’s easy to put an iconic quote like this on your screensaver, so how might we follow Camus’ advice in practice? I think it is about making a habit of noticing the possibilities for making choices in our daily lives, both large and small, instead of letting them pass by through inattention, denial or blissful ignorance. At the end of each day we might look back and ask ourselves: Was I fully aware of the choices I made – at home, at work, as a parent, as a friend, as a citizen? We can then reflect on what these choices tell us about our values and priorities. Eventually we may come to recognise that carpe diem calls on us not to live each day as if it were our last, but to live each day as if we are what we choose, and as if each of our choices were a matter of consequence.
DISCIPLES OF EXPERIENCE
The choices that we make do more than shape our identities and give meaning to our lives; they are also a route to experiential insight. And it is when we become disciples of experience that the barriers to seizing the day really begin to crumble.
If you visit the personal development shelves in bookshops, you will encounter hundreds of bullet-point tips and tricks for surmounting the barriers to taking action. One bestselling anti-procrastination guide suggests the following classic method: ‘break your goal into small, specific m
inigoals’. So instead of saying, ‘I’m going to write the report,’ you say, ‘I’ll spend thirty minutes working on a plan for my spreadsheet tonight. Tomorrow I’ll spend another thirty minutes filling in the data, and then the next day, I’ll spend an hour writing a report based on the data’.37 And Hey Presto, it’s done.
Such behavioural strategies might work if your carpe diem ambitions are limited to writing data reports and other checklist, self-contained tasks. But what about when it comes to more emotionally charged, socially complex or personally challenging issues like whether to have IVF treatment, or set up a charity, or attend Alcoholics Anonymous, or move in with your partner, or abandon your legal career, or come out as gay?
In such cases, where the existential stakes may be higher and the uncertainties greater, we need a different approach. But what? It’s a question I have been grappling with for years, both in my own life, and as a writer and teacher on the art of living. How do we make the big decisions? After we’ve read books, attended courses and talked about it endlessly, how do we overcome the barriers and seize the day?
I am sceptical of simplistic, one-shot solutions to life’s struggles, but if I were to build a temple in honour of carpe diem, I would have this motto carved over the entrance: Act First, Think Later.
This piece of guidance may be worth more than all those other tips and tricks put together. I first grasped its importance when writing a previous book about career change.38 It turns out that if you are searching for fulfilling and meaningful work that does more than just pay the bills, you are most likely to find it by rejecting what careers counsellors usually advise, which is to do lots of research and planning to pinpoint the right career, then start sending out your résumé. This might get you a job, but it’s unlikely to be fulfilling in the long term. In fact, you should do the opposite of this ‘plan then implement’ model. Instead of thinking then doing, we need to do first and reflect afterwards. In practice this means getting out into the real world and trying out different jobs for yourself, for instance by shadowing, volunteering or experimenting. That’s what I did with my first kitchen class – it was an Act First, Think Later experiment that I did on the side of my existing job. And that’s how we best find out what is likely (or not likely) to give us fulfilment – through being immersed in the white heat of experience. As the organisational change expert Herminia Ibarra observes, ‘The only way to create change is to put our possible identities into practice, working and crafting them until they are sufficiently grounded in experience to guide more decisive steps…We learn who we are by testing reality, not by looking inside.’39
What goes for career change goes for life more generally. We should move beyond the old Enlightenment attitude that treats life decisions as a rational process where we think through the options and arguments, weigh them up on a set of perfectly calibrated existential scales, then make a decision. The truth is that there are no scales – or at least none that we should fully trust.40 You can draw up a list of carefully defined criteria for the perfect lover – their physical appearance, educational background, sense of humour – and yet when you finally meet someone who ticks all the boxes they may do absolutely nothing for you. But then you stumble across someone who seems a total mismatch and they completely blow you away. Life isn’t always about logical planning – it’s about lived experiences that challenge our assumptions and offer a route to insight and self-discovery.41
This does not mean we should jettison rational deliberation completely. It’s just that there can come a point when thinking about it more doesn’t help. Stepping into experience gives us useful new information – not just about what a particular experience is really like, but also how it makes us feel.
We might find inspiration in Leonardo da Vinci, who signed his name with the added flourish, ‘disciple of experience’.42 Yet beware, for experience can be a cruel master. The word ‘experience’ is rooted in the Latin experimentia, meaning ‘experiment’, and is also related to periculum, the Latin for ‘danger’.43 The implications are clear: there is an inherent peril or risk in following a more experiential path in life. Just as Leonardo’s brilliant career was full of failed experiments, our own seize-the-day experiments will sometimes fail too. But what of it? Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the nineteenth century’s greatest proponents of carpe diem, entreated us to embrace this reality:
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.44
SCULPTING THE SELF
All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces… So it is important to fashion one’s work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.
Alberto Giacometti45
Carpe diem living is ultimately an act of profound self-creation. We can imagine ourselves as a sculptor who builds up a figure by adding small pieces of clay, layer upon layer – a little like the works of the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. Each choice we make is like one of these wads of clay, giving shape to our self-portrait. Over time, with the accumulated additions, we continually refashion ourselves.
Occasionally we make a major decision and our sculpted self takes on a new form. Sometimes we make mistakes and struggle to scrape off the ill-placed clay, but we can always add more layers over and around it, re-adjusting the figure by making wiser, more experienced choices. There may be times when our choices begin to follow social conventions, and so the sculpture starts to resemble others we know and loses its uniqueness. We might procrastinate, circling round and round our work in progress, unsure where to add the next layer.
Periodically, we stand back and look at the figure before us, created by an accretion of choices over the years. Are we satisfied with what we see? Can we detect meaning in its features and purpose in its gaze?
The sculpture will, inevitably, end in pieces and be crushed back into the earth. Until that day, we possess a creative power to give it such energy and vitality that it might almost come to life and start moving of its own accord. That is the promise of carpe diem.
Notes
1 Locke 1690, Chapter 2, Section 56.
2 McMahon 2006, 10–12.
3 McMahon 2006, 104, 176–177, 204.
4 Krznaric 2011, 88–91; McMahon 2006, 104, 176–177, 204, 219–221, 356–359; Arendt 1989, 14–16; Haybron 2013, 19–23.
5 Philosopher Gary Cox’s book on existentialism, for example, makes the link to carpe diem explicit, ending with the lines: ‘Be a true existentialist, be authentic, seize your freedom, seize the day. Carpe diem as the noble Romans used to say.’ (Cox 2011, 106).
6 Sartre 1946, 16.
7 Bakewell 2016, 15, 21.
8 De Beauvoir 2015, 14–15.
9 Fanon 1963, 22, 30. Not all existentialists took Sartre’s radical position on Algeria. Camus, for instance, was much less sympathetic to the cause of independence (Zaretsky 2013, 84).
10 Sartre 1946, 16; de Beauvoir 2015, 78; Flynn 2006, 78–70. Unfortunately Sartre never got around to writing the book on ethics and existentialism that he had always promised, leaving his philosophy lacking a strong moral framework. De Beauvoir made much more effort in this field, evident in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity.
11 Russell 1984, 683.
12 Over the years Sen has regularly quoted Horace in his academic papers, and even gave him a mention in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. However, I have found no record of him directly quoting Ode XI.
13 Sen 1999, xi, 14–15, 284.
14 Sen 1999, 282, 298.
15 These basics broadly reflect Sen’s list of what he calls ‘crucial instrumental freedoms’: economic opportunities, political freedoms, social facilities, transparency guarantees and protective security (Sen 1999, xii).
16 De Beauvo
ir 1997, 445–447; Bakewell 2016, 216.
17 Seneca 1932, Section 16.
18 Quoted in Steel (2007, 67).
19 Steel 2007, 65.
20 Steel 2007, 65–66.
21 Steel 2007, 67, 73–84; see also Burka and Yuen (2008, xiii, 6, 19).
22 Schwartz 2005, 3.
23 Schwartz 2005, 5.
24 Kahneman 2011, 283–286; Kringelbach and Phillips 2014, 158–160.
25 Kahneman 2011, 130.
26 Smith 2007, 1–17; Adams 2001, 15–17.
27 http://www.monbiot.com/2014/01/20/addicted-to-comfort/
28 Beckett 2006, 87.
29 Frankl 1973, 108, 89, 39.
30 The idea of expressing choice in terms of what you are ‘for’ can be found in philosopher Ruth Chang’s TED talk, ‘How to Make Hard Choices’(2014): https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choices?language=en
31 Quoted in Cox (2011, 5).
32 For a discussion of Sartre’s concept of the ‘fundamental project’ see Sartre (1969, 564–567 ) and Bakewell (2016, 215).
33 Sartre 1946, 7, 9; Yalom 1991, 8.
34 Quoted in Arendt (1989, 175).
35 Chang 2014.
36 Camus 2005, 60–61; Flynn 2006, 72–78; Sartre 1978, 54–55; Sartre 1946, 14.
37 Burka and Yuen 2008, 289.
38 Krznaric 2012, 75–85.
39 Ibarra 2004, xii, 18.
40 For an enlightening critique of the Enlightenment tradition of rational, deliberative thought, see Gladwell (2006, 141), who argues that ‘truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking’.
Carpe Diem Regained Page 24