Which Lives are Best-Lived or Wasted?

Questioning Joan Didion’s advice on seizing the moment

AI-generated image by Alexa from Pixabay

• “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
  ― Joan Didion

Joan Didion here gives perhaps the most popular kind of life advice. I call it the “rich, full life” meme. Seize the day! Don’t withdraw into a shell and let your life pass you by. Take advantage of your opportunities, and live life to the full.

The antithesis of this rich, full life would be a wasted life, and notice that most purported spiritual elites throughout history who’ve retreated to monasteries, mountaintops, or caves have deliberately wasted their allotment of adult decades.