“Carpe Diem” Doesn’t Mean “Seize the Day”
In some fairly important ways — it means just the opposite.
Surely the only way the Roman poet Horace managed to bang out four books of odes, two books of satires, and a treatise about poetry in his lifetime was with a #RiseAndGrind mentality. But shockingly, the Romans didn’t know about “Hustle Culture,” their top poets never even mentioned the idea of a #grindset, and Extreme Productivity podcasts wouldn’t be invented for another two thousand-odd years. To make matters worse, Horace’s iconic lifehacking catchphrase, “Carpe Diem”—meaning “Seize the Day”—wasn’t a lifehack, wasn’t a catchphrase, and doesn’t really mean “Seize the Day” after all.
The real way Horace managed to find time for all that poetry is through the time-honored technique of landing a very easy civil service job so he could wrestle with Asclepiadean meter during work hours, but the story of how “Carpe Diem” came to be a well-meaning but overly energetic bumper sticker is a bit more complicated.
