Memento Mori Disc Swap! *Entry Deadline Extended to Oct 17th!*

It isn’t that life is short, Seneca reminds us, it’s that we waste so much of it. We squander time arguing with strangers online and answering emails that could just be deleted. We sit in boring meetings. We gossip and whine. We stay stuck in jobs we hate to chase money or because we’re too timid to change careers. Or even just how we hide parts of ourselves because we're worried how we’ll come across—too weird, too rude, too much—or do activities we don’t enjoy just to fit in with the popular crowd. Marcus Aurelius, frustrated with some obnoxious thing that was consuming his days, once asked himself. “You’re afraid of death,” he said, “because you won’t be able to do this anymore?”

That’s the power of memento mori—the clarity it offers. By keeping death close, it reminds us what we truly cherish about life. David Kessler, a grief and loss expert who has spent serious time with people on death’s door, recently told us on the Daily Stoic podcast (it’s a powerful episode, listen here) that this is what stands out most about the dying. “Everything we worry about day to day,” he said, “you just don’t worry about at the end.”

He shared a story with us of someone at home, enjoying the company of some friends and family in the last chapter of their life. One of their friends asked if they wanted to see their new car, which was parked outside in the driveway.

“And [the dying person was] like, ‘No. No, I don’t.’ It’s like how ridiculous was that concept all of a sudden? You just realize everything that what we thought was going to make us happy and become how we identify ourselves just means nothing. It means nothing. What matters is the people, it’s the love, it’s everything else.”

Again, this is the insight that memento mori provides us. By thinking, by imagining that we’ve just been given a few months to live, we too can see immediately what we should stop doing. We realize we don’t have any more time to waste. And before you know it, there is this urgent emergent need to do the things we love in place of the things don’t, to spend time with the people we love instead of wasting it on those we don’t.

This is the positive side of the memento mori thought exercise: not “What would I stop doing?” but rather “What would I start doing?” How would I spend the limited time I had left? Where would I find meaning and purpose and joy?

Whatever that is, do more of it today. Because you are mortal. Because what matters is people, it’s love. Everything else is besides the point.

And while Halloween is often a playful time of year here in America, full of tricks and treats, it’s also an opportunity to practice memento mori, a reminder to treat our time as a gift and not waste it on the trivial and vain. Soon we’ll be just like those skeletons we’re decorating with. Soon we’ll be under a tombstone ourselves.