> You should organize each day as if it were your last
I never understood this. If you live every day as your last, surely you would only engage in short term pleasures instead of pursuing longer term hobbies/goals?
I never understood this. If you live every day as your last, surely you would only engage in short term pleasures instead of pursuing longer term hobbies/goals?
Whatever you go out & gather, is ultimately worthless. So if you're in a shit mood & thinking that some day this work will pay off, you'll find that your days are spent in a shit mood & thinking some day this work will pay off. & then you die & everything you did doesn't really matter, & you spent your time in a shit mood. So if instead you find enjoyment in the simple daily toll, that your work today is essentially paying for the food you'll enjoy today, then you'll find your days are spent in a good mood. & then you die & everything you did doesn't really matter, but at least you enjoyed your time while it lasted
So "live it like your last" is a bit hyperbolic, but at least don't justify your suffering on the idea that life gets better
To try make sense of "live it like your last", it might be better said as "go to sleep at peace with your life even if you were to die in the night"
Perhaps what is more productive is: live your days so that when you think back on them (let’s say at a time horizon of months), you feel satisfied in what you’ve done and how you’ve grown.
Problem with this statement is that what matters after someone does really doesn’t matter to that person after only before, also, on a long enough time span nothing will matter after. Does what most people did 3000 years ago matter? 10000? A million? I wouldn’t chase legacies
A better 'problem' to point out might be the timespan over which few legacies that are remembered originate. 'I want to be the Tutankhamen of my time' is all very well, but there's no reason to think there will even be one.
Their names were Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/475275
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Edited to correct attribution error.
As someone who put in the effort for many of these things and is now reaping the reward, I am certainly glad my past self got me here.
Sure, a little misfortune could have led me to a drastically different state today.
But as the saying goes:
> God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.
God was added there, in a very convenient rephrasing, as if to switch the responsibility from oneself (the core of Epictetus' stoicism, what he was talking about), to God.
„If I took this minute / this day / this month / this year of my life... and somebody were to tell me that I had to live it over and over again, ad infinitum, with everything exactly as it was, and nothing changed at all... would I be screaming Hell Yes, or would I be screaming Hell No?“
To me, it‘s an appeal not to recklessness or consumption of short-term pleasures, but to living in integrity with oneself. Not to take shortcuts which you think you‘ll somehow be able to compartmentalizations out of your life. And I think he meant it also to be applied in retrospect: Whatver you did, and whatever happened in your life... can you „own“ it, with all its apparent flaws, and pains and errors? Are you able to see yourself, and see your own life, beyond the categories of of good and bad? Can you, like a good author, take the good, the bad and the ugly from your past and create something of truth and beauty from it?
If that argument were actually valid, it would be a fully general refutation of any possible use of your time whatsoever. There's a reason the narrative trope of "trapped in a time loop" contains the word "trapped".
2) There’s an augment to made that anything you do or think is predetermined anyway, by past, biology and circumstances. Or, if you prefer, that it’s all based on a fundamental randomness. Either way, that you are more a symptom of the universe than an independent agent. In that sense, Nietzsche’s thought experiment might actually be closer to reality than we think.
3) How can you possibly know that your life right now is not actually just such a recurrence? The fact that you don’t know that it is one would be, of course, part of the script. (Knowing that it is a recurrence would be changing something. And that nothing will be changed is part of the premise.)
Meanwhile as you point out, if you focus on living in the moment only, you'll live on cheap small rewards in life.
I think a lot of good long term strategy with allotments for little impulse to pepper life is the best mix, at least for me, so that's how I live. Every now and then I'll splurge and do something unplanned a little extravagant but that's because I already budgeted for that sort of stuff -- my little fun pocket change time and money. Meanwhile I have nice set long term goals that improve my overall life experience as I get older. Some may never happen and that's fine because I'm not living my life wailing for that special time.
How do you feel about "You should organize each day to be the best possible prototype for all following days?"
You're definitely understanding it correctly. It's atrociously dangerous advice for any manner of long-term well-being. Humans can reasonably live to 80-100 years of age. Trying to live even 18,000 days as your last is psychotic and impossible, it's both not worth attempting that and harmful to attempt it. Being healthy requires thinking and acting longer term; building savings over a lifetime requires long-term thinking; raising children successfully requires long-term thinking.
Try raising children one day to the next with the guiding parental premise being: this is our last day on earth, what shall we do? It's a recipe for disaster to try to live in short-term thinking day to day.
One of our greatest attributes is the capacity to think, plan and act for the long-term, as many of the things we want require such. Notice I didn't say everyone thinks long-term consistently; notice I didn't pretend all of our institutions think long-term all the time; both are standard issue sarcastic criticisms against long-term thinking, neither of which invalidate the value of long-term thinking.
The correct answer is that some things benefit from (and or require) short-term thinking (particularly immediate focus), some things benefit from (and or require) medium-term thinking, some things benefit from (and or require) long-term thinking. Where thinking implies the comprehensive (thinking, planning, acting, etc).
Me neither. I think there are two distinct possibilities you should consider when you think what to do today. First one is that you may die today. Second is that you may not die today.
The thing to realise is that many people don't have any desire to try (the things that we call) drugs, so your comment isn't exposing some flaw in the advice.
If an oracle told me it actually is my last day, I'm not suddenly going to smoke some weed, snort some cocaine, and shoot up some heroin. I wouldn't want to any more than knowing (or assuming, as I do) that I'll live until (at least!) tomorrow.
You could take out every bit of loan or debt accessible and transfer all the money to charity. You could burn down the HQ of an oil company.
If you live in a country without the rule of Law, like Russia, where known killers and criminals hold positions of power, you could try your hand at assasinating one of them.
Implicitly, he is also saying that what drives people to waste their time and concern themselves with petty issues, unimportant to their fundamental existence and be drowned in "everydayness", is the ever-lurking-in-the-background assumption that "I have got plenty of time".
This approach strikes a nice balance. It gives you enough time to be able to really do something and change directions if you want. But not so much time that you can really waste any. It forces you to ask the hard questions about whether your day to day is truly connecting with your dreams, and whether you're on a path to get there.
Of course, Seneca didn't have life expectancy tables to work with. But I think he would have approved. :)
I’d prefer to spend the close of my 20s doing something else like raving on a warm beach with a bunch of people who don’t know me and won’t miss me tomorrow, and hopefully finding one or two fellow travellers who I can keep in touch with until my dying days :)
exploration vs exploitation
My conclusion has been to not take the time scale literally. I find it useful to act as though I only have 3 years left. That’s a good timescale to have life operate properly, but also realize you need to make hard choices sooner rather than later.
We all do. Even if we choose to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Isn't that the entire point of the exercise? Is there necessarily any better payoff, either way?