[hauget]

46. RIP.

"Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” - Seneca

[spodek]

“Zhuangzi's wife died. When Huizu went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. "You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old," said Huizu. "It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far, isn't it?"

Zhuangzi said, "You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.

"Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_Zhou

[nostromo]

“Live each day like it’s your last.”

“Live like you’ll never die.”

The more I think about these two sentiments, the more I think the more popular one is bad advice, and the less popular one is good advice.

[KineticLensman]

"Live like you’ll never die" can be a reason to put things off because you'll do them in the future. And then the world changes and possible paths are suddenly closed to you.

Anecdata: my father died relatively young in his 50s after a decade of ill health that had forced him to give up some of the things that he loved, like sailing. This made a very big impression on me (I was in my mid-20s), specifically that you only get one life and you must make the most of your health while you have it. I am now older than he was when he died and I don't have a bucket list of things that I want to do in the future. That's because I've already done those things, rather than postpone them until I retire. That said, I'm currently in the process of seeing if I can bootstrap a totally new career for myself, in the outdoor conservation space after decades in the office in the s/w industry. I might not make it but at least I've tried.

YMMV.

[bernulli]

One of the last things my mother told me before dying in her fifties was “but there’s still so much I wanted to do”. I drew a “life calendar”, crossed out all the years I had already spent, marked her age when she died and more statistically relevant life expectancies and hung it over my desk. I quit my job and started something new not long after.

[jliptzin]

Good luck!

[darkerside]

Personally, I believe the key is to reconcile the two. Operate on that fine line that optimizes best for both this being your last day or just one link in an unending chain.

Save money like you'll need it forever, work hard for more money so you can spend it on what you love, and actually spend it, all in balance.

[cortesoft]

You need to live each day as if it may be one of many days to come or it may be your last.

Be ready for either possibility.

[jakeva]

I'm curious what you think is which? For me, "live like you'll never die" is more motivating than "live each day like it's your last".

[np-]

I don’t see any value in being dogmatic about it one way or another. Personally I’d just shorten it to “Live your life.” It will mean different things to different people, but perhaps that is ok.

[dogbox]

Nice to see some Stoic Memento Mori here. I'm actually currently going through Seneca's Dialogues and Essays.

[rmk]

How does one accomplish a semblance of this? Has someone tried and written down what worked (or did not work)?

I'd love to read up more on this.

[airstrike]

One approach is to live every day as if you would live it forever again until eternity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return#Friedrich_Nietz...

The concept of "eternal recurrence"––"the idea that all events in the world repeat themselves in the same sequence through an eternal series of cycles"––is central to the mature writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing", [citation needed] referring to it as a burden of the "heaviest weight" ("das schwerste Gewicht") imaginable. He professes that the wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life:

> What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [The Gay Science, §341]

To comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, "love of fate":

> My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.

[garren]

Seneca’s Epistles no doubt touches on his views of death through the lens of his Stoic practices. I’ve found Ward Farnsworth’s ‘The Practicing Stoic’ to be an accessible, light, introduction to some of Seneca’s works among others. William Irving, in his book ‘Guide to the Good Life’, labels the technique hinted at in the quote: negative visualization.

[murat124]

Montaigne did some writing on how to live life.

[vitili]

And Seneca wrote on how to die.

[DarthGhandi]

Stoicism comes to mind.

[whoisninja]

amen