Carpe Diem — Seize the Day

Why it Does not Mean What You Think it Means

I write this article on the 16th of October, 2022. There are 76 days left until the end of the year: two months and a half. Usually, as the time left in the year is less than three months, most of us start thinking about the following year, and what it might be like. We no longer consider the time left in the current year as the time in which significant progress can be made against our objectives. Hmm.

76 days may not be a lot, but it is plenty. Even if you leave a couple of weeks as a cushion for the unexpected, for reviewing the current year and planning for the next one, you will still have 60 days left. That is still enough to make a dent in a lot of things.

What are you trying to get done? For example, if you start learning a foreign language tomorrow, in 60 days you can easily get to at least A2 level of proficiency. That’s good, solid progress.

Of course, a lot depends on how you treat time. This brings me to the topic of this article.

CARPE DIEM.

This phrase in Latin means — seize the day. Taken literally, this has become the slogan of hedonists. Pleasure above all. Tomorrow does not matter. Enjoy today.

Is that what it means though?

The phrase was originally used in Roman poet Horace’s Odes. The original phrase goes: “carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” — “Seize the day, put very little trust in tomorrow”. Most simplistic explanations typically refer to Horace’s connection to Epicureanism (philosophy focusing on pleasure), hence the hedonistic understanding.

The first problem with this superficial interpretation is that Epicureanism is not just about pleasure. A lot of emphasis in this philosophy was on mental pleasure, more than physical one, on freedom from anxiety and pain, on alleviating the fear of death, etc. I am not going to go into the details about Epicureanism, that is a subject for another article perhaps.

However, the second problem is that Horace was not strictly speaking a follower of Epicureanism. His poems reflected a range of views, consistent with the philosophy of Epicureanism, but also stoicism and other philosophies.

When Horace wrote — seize the day, put very little trust in tomorrow — he did not suggest ignoring tomorrow, but rather not being a hopeless optimist about what tomorrow might bring. To do what needs to be done today, so tomorrow is more likely to be the tomorrow we hope for. Recall Murphy’s laws: “If anything can go wrong, it will”, or my favorite “left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse”. You need to do your best to influence the course of events, even if eventually you will have to accept the way things will turn out. But doing nothing and just letting tomorrow play out as it would, was not something Horace (or anyone in their right mind) would suggest.

In a way, carpe diem is not a suggestion to focus on mindfulness, on being here and now, but not in a passive sense of just being present. The focus is on being here and doing the work. So rather than “have all the fun you can”, the key message here should be understood as “focus on now and do what you can to build the tomorrow you want”.

Remember, what you do today becomes the past. Immediately. Tomorrow is not some bright future. Just in one day, your tomorrow will become your today, and then just as quickly, your yesterday. And if every today you waste in pursuit of pleasures, soon enough most, if not all of your tomorrows will not match your expectations.

It is helpful to put things in perspective. We often think that we have all the time in the world. We don’t. Here is a chart, courtesy of bryanbraun.com. You enter your birthday and it shows you how much of a potential 90-year span you have already lived.

It can be a bit of a wake-up call, no? Assuming I will live 90 years, and assuming all 90 of that I will be functional, I am pretty much at the halfway point. Things start feeling much more uncomfortable if I set the life expectancy at less than 90.

Of course, whatever number you put at the end of such a chart, you are still being very optimistic. We don’t know how much time we have left. It may be a lot, but it may be very little.

Stoics have the concept of memento mori — remembering that you are mortal, a useful concept to use in conjunction with my interpretation of what carpe diem means. Basically, keep in mind that you are mortal and that there is an end to all this, so seize the day. Don’t waste it. I prefer this kind of interaction between these two concepts, rather than the popular belief that they are each other’s opposites.

Here is a practical suggestion I picked up from a Russian time-management author Gleb Arkhangelsky — start a “pinarik” calendar — a calendar for kicking yourself. The rows of the calendar include each day of the month. Every morning, you diagonally cross over the current day, say from the top left corner to the bottom right. Every evening, you cross over again, from the top right corner to the bottom left. This very quickly gives you a sense of the passage of time.

So sit down and remind yourself what were the objectives that you boldly determined for yourself at the beginning of 2022. Over nine months have passed since then. It is what it is. You may have done a lot, or you may have done very little. But there are still at least good 60 days to go this year. What can you do in 60 days? How much progress can you make?

Seize the day. Carpe diem.