As your Dad, there’s a fact of life as painful for me as it is true.
You’re going to die.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
Benjamin Franklin
So if death is inevitable, how will you make the most of life?
My answer has for you has 4 parts:
1. Memento Mori
We have two lives; the second one begins when we realise we only have one
Confucius
You can’t live life to its full if its shortness is lost on you.
Yeah yeah, life’s short, you get it. But do you? Do you really Reg? How long have you actually got? What’s the average life expectancy these days? 80 years maybe?
Well, don’t think about it in years. That’s for wasteful fools. Think about it in terms of events.
How many more:
- 🍗 Christmas dinners will you eat?
- 🫂 Heartfelt hugs will you enjoy?
- 🌅 Sunsets will you marvel at?
- ☀️ Summer evenings will you bask in?
- ❤️ Times will you make love?
Personally, in my current life stage, my events relate to you!
How many more times:
- will I carry you on my shoulders?
- will we kick a football to each other?
- will we cook porridge together?
- will you look at me as if I’m a flawless human being?
My tank of priceless moments is draining fast.
But with consciousness comes awareness. And awareness of depleting life experiences will keep what the Stoics called ‘Memento Mori’ (or ‘remember you will die’) top of mind.
You’ll be present. You’ll begin to ‘suck the marrow’ out of every wonderful human experience.
2. Make Novel Memories
The more memories you have, the more elongated time feels.
Memories are lodged in our brain through novelty and intensity. If you experience a novel and intense event, you’re extremely likely to recall it years from now.
I must have travelled the same route to work hundreds of times. But when I try to remember these car journeys, just one grey and vague snapshot comes to mind.
Why? Because nothing notable happened.
If during one of these commutes however, a motorcyclist had spectacularly crashed in front of me, and I’d heroically rushed to their aid to perform life-saving CPR, do you think I’d be able to remember it? Of course I would.
Moreover, if something remarkable like this happened on every journey, I’d now be blessed with hundreds of different memories.
The more often memories get ‘tagged’ to our timeline, the slower our perception of time passed.
This is why old people complain that time goes quicker the older you get.
What my senior friends don’t know is that’s correlation not causation.
And the root cause is the elderly just don’t have as many novel and intense experiences as youngsters. The ageing population tends to be risk averse and entrenched in routine. They have less memories, and therefore feel like time is accelerating.
You can avoid this troublesome fate by making more memories.
So move more. Travel more. Experience more. Risk more.
Slow your time down.
3. Play The Leading Role
The no.1 regret of the dying?
They hadn’t been true to themselves.
In other words, they wished they’d lived a life on their own terms, pursuing what they wanted rather than what they thought others wanted of them.
If you’re not the leading role in your own life, you’re the supporting role in someone elses.
So fuck what others want you to do, Reg.
Use the limited time you have left over to do what you want, and know there are no adults. Everything you see around you was created by a human as insecure and as under confident as everyone else.
You can do anything (not everything) you want, so make sure you choose to invest your precious time and energy on something driven by your own curiousity & impetus, not someone else.
4. Use Your Teeth
I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on – and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.
Jean-Paul Satre
What our man JP touches upon here is a lifelong affliction that’s followed me around like a crazy ex-girlfriend.
It’s the notion of ‘when I’m X, I’ll start living life for real’.
It’s the idea that life hasn’t really begun yet. As soon as you achieve some extrinsic goal (money, status, geography etc…), you’ll give yourself permission to start living.
No Reg.
This thinking is cancer. And the only effective chemotherapy is to understand you’re pissing life away.
Today you’re the youngest, healthiest and most vital you’ll ever be. You have a full mouth of teeth. So start biting.
Clearly, I’m not advocating unadulterated hedonism here. As mentioned in Letter 2 – Short Term Vs Long Term, I think the key to long term happiness is enduring undesirable short-term conditions.
But there’s a balance you need to frequently consider.
There’ll probably be things on your ‘bucket list’ you’ve resigned to doing ‘when I’m X’. I’d implore you to reexamine these and ask yourself how you can structure your life to do them (or something similar) in the nearer future.
So, Memento Mori Reg. Make memories, live your own life and don’t wait.
That way, when you die, you’ll do so with a smile on your face.