Carpe Diem: Seizing the Day in a Distracted World - Softcover

Roman Krznaric, PhD., is a cultural thinker and writer on the art of living and social change. His previous books, which include Empathy, How Should We Live? and How to Find Fulfilling Work, have been published in over twenty languages. He is founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum and of the digital Empathy Library. He is also a founding faculty member of the internationally acclaimed The School of Life.
 
Roman has been named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading popular philosophers. He has given talks everywhere from the Edinburgh International Festival to Google HQ in California. His US media work includes articles in the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine, and interviews on PBS television and WNYC Radio.

CARPE DIEM FROM HORACE TO #YOLO

On a summer morning in 2014, eighty-nine-year-old Bernard Jordan decided to escape. The former British naval officer was determined to go to Normandy to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings with other World War II veterans. But there was a problem: he was trapped in a nursing home in the English seaside town of Hove, without permission to travel. What could he do? Bernard came up with a cunning plan. He got up early and put on his best suit, making sure to pin on his wartime medals, then covered his outfit with a gray raincoat and sneaked out of the home. Now free, he tottered down to the railway station nearly a mile away and took the next train to Portsmouth. Once there, he bought himself a ticket for the ferry to France and, on board, joined up with a party of war veterans who took him under their wing for the rest of the trip.

As soon as the care staff realized he was missing, a frantic police search began on the streets of Hove and in local hospitals. But by then it was too late. Bernard was already across the Channel, surrounded by marching bands and dancing girls. “I loved every minute of it and would do it again tomorrow—it was such an exciting experience,” he said on his return. “I expect I will be in some trouble with the care home, but it was worth it. I was naughty, but I had to be there.”[i]

The story of Bernard’s great escape took the British media by storm, knocking the sober anniversary speeches by world leaders and royalty off the front pages. The ferry company even offered him free travel to the Normandy beaches for the rest of his life. But Bernard was never able to take up that offer: six months later, he died.

Why did Bernard’s adventure capture so much public attention? It was not just nostalgia for the wartime spirit or his venerable age. People also admired his courage to seize a window of opportunity that might never come again. The chance was there, and he took it. As one person commented in an online forum just after his death: “RIP, am doubly glad he escaped and got to go to the anniversary . . . carpe diem.”[ii]

Carpe diem—“seize the day”—is one of the oldest philosophical mottoes in Western history. First uttered by the Roman poet Horace more than two thousand years ago, it retains an extraordinary resonance in popular culture. The heavy metal band Metallica has rocked audiences around the world with their song “Carpe Diem Baby,” while the actress Judi Dench had “CARPE DIEM” tattooed on her wrist for her eighty-first birthday. Ask someone to spell out their philosophy of life and there’s a good chance they will say something like “seize the day” or “live as if there’s no tomorrow”—even if they appear to be trapped by routine or paralyzed by procrastination. It’s a message found in Hollywood films like Dead Poets Society, in one of the most successful brand campaigns of the last century (“Just Do It”), and in the social media hashtag #YOLO (“you only live once”). Almost every language has an equivalent expression for the original Latin phrase. In Japanese it’s 今を楽しめ (“enjoy now”), while wise Slovak grandmothers advise the young to i naplno (“live fully”). Carpe diem has been a call to arms for everyone from the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, who in the first century BCE asked, “If not now, when?” to the Rastafarian sage Bob Marley, who sang out, “Wake up and live!” If Horace were transported to the present, he would probably be surprised to discover that there is a heaving nightclub in Croatia named Carpe Diem, and dozens of fashion companies with carpe diem clothing lines—including a T-shirt that commands us all to “Carpe That F*cking Diem.”

It is remarkable that an expression from a long-dead language generates more than twenty-five million online search results. But just as striking is the fact that while most people can explain what carpe diem means to them, the answer varies greatly from one person to the next. For some, it’s about that Bernard Jordan attitude of grasping a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Yet others associate it with wild, hedonistic blowouts, or immersing themselves calmly in the present moment. This range of responses is reflected in the diverse translations of “carpe diem” that abound: while usually rendered as “seize” the day, it is sometimes translated as “harvest,” “pluck,” or “enjoy” the day. We might casually use the term “carpe diem” when chatting with a friend, but how aware are we of its many personalities hidden beneath the surface?

This book is my attempt to unravel how we think about carpe diem—to explore its various meanings and messages, its dangers and contradictions, its role in both personal life and social change. It might sound strange to talk about carpe diem as if it were an abstract noun like “love” or “truth,” but I consider it to be a philosophical ideal that embodies a vision of how to live, similar to concepts such as happiness or freedom, and so I write about it in a comparable way. I want to understand what really motivates it, and what can make it such a difficult ideal to follow. Is carpe diem ultimately about the fear of death, a remedy for that instinctive—but often fleeting—awareness so many of us have that life is short and our time is running out? Or is it just as much about expressing our desire for freedom and being the author of our own life?

My approach is necessarily eclectic, taking in everything from medieval carnival tradition to the neuropsychology of risk, from the history of opium addiction to existentialist thought. I will be delving into the lives of great seize-the-day practitioners, including nightclub dancers, war photographers, and committed revolutionaries. While mainly drawing on examples from the Western world, this is a journey that will take us from the streets of ancient Kyoto to the streets of contemporary Rio. To my knowledge, this is the first-ever cultural and philosophical biography of carpe diem—which is astonishing given its bumper-sticker ubiquity in everyday life.

In the course of writing this book I have made two discoveries. First, that carpe diem has been hijacked, and as a result its potential to transform our lives is rapidly slipping away from us. Second, that humanity has, over the centuries, found five distinct ways to seize the day—and if we want to win back carpe diem from the hijackers, we need to revive them. My hope is to wake us up to the promise of Horace’s maxim. The prize it offers is great: nothing less than the gift of radical aliveness or, to borrow a phrase from Henry David Thoreau, the possibility “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”[iii] If, however, we fail to heed its call, we may end up reaching our final days and looking back on life with regret, viewing it as a series of paths not taken. The time has come to reclaim carpe diem.

THE VANISHING ART OF SEIZING THE DAY

The hijack of carpe diem is the existential crime of the century—and one that we have barely noticed. It might seem odd to claim that a phrase from a dead Roman poet has been “hijacked,” but the evidence is compelling. Who, or what, are the hijackers in question? First, the spirit of “seize the day” has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and the instant hit of one-click online buying: in essence, Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It. Alongside this is the growing cult of efficiency and time management that has driven us toward hyper-scheduled living, turning the spontaneity of Just Do It into a culture of Just Plan It. A third hijacker is 24-7 digital entertainment, which is replacing vibrant life experiences with vicarious, screen-based pleasures, and contributing to a new age of distraction. Rather than Just Do It, we increasingly Just Watch It instead. Finally—and though it might seem counterintuitive—carpe diem has been hijacked by the booming mindfulness movement. While practicing mindfulness has many proven benefits, from reducing stress to helping with depression, one of its unintended consequences has been to encourage the idea that seizing the day is primarily about living in the here and now. Just Do It has become Just Breathe.

Confronted by these four hijackers, the art of seizing the day is vanishing before our eyes, and we urgently need to do something about it, or else risk losing touch with the carpe diem wisdom of humanity that has accumulated over the past two millennia. I will be exploring in detail how this cultural hijacking has happened, and how we might best respond.

What about my second discovery? Curious to find out more about the different meanings people give to carpe diem, I decided to dig deeper and embark on a study of the way that phrases such as “carpe diem,” “seize the day,” and “seize the moment” have been used across the arts, sciences, literature, popular culture, and media. This involved analyzing hundreds of original sources going back to the sixteenth century, with the help of a crack research team and some big databases in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.[iv] A fascinating pattern soon began to emerge, revealing five essential interpretations of carpe diem through the centuries, an ensemble of ways that humankind has developed to seize the day.

The most popular of these interpretations I call opportunity, which concerns taking a window of opportunity that may never be repeated, whether it’s the career break of a lifetime or the chance to rescue a crumbling relationship. A second strategy is hedonism, where we seize the day through sensory pleasures, from free love to gastronomic exploration. Another is presence, which includes mindfully entering the present moment through methods such as meditation, but also extends to more vigorous activities such as the intense rush of extreme sports or getting entranced in dance. Fourth is spontaneity, which involves throwing plans and routines to the wind and becoming more experimental in the way we live. Finally, there is the approach that is most often ignored or forgotten: politics. This is the realm of collective carpe diem, such as taking to the streets to topple a dictator or mobilizing a social movement to tackle climate change.

These five paths cannot be found neatly laid out in any one spiritual tradition or philosophical doctrine, and we are mostly unaware of them. Although sometimes overlapping, they represent a distinct range of cultural tendencies, each of them a strategy that human beings have invented to inoculate themselves against the reality of death and to make the most of their brief moment of earthly existence. And why do they matter? Because it is precisely these rich approaches that have been hijacked. The challenge is to reclaim our cultural inheritance by reviving this quintet of ways to seize the day and harnessing their insights for the art of living.

This is an important historical moment for doing so. Despite living longer and more materially prosperous lives than at almost any moment in the past, and enjoying the benefits of handy iGadgets, cheap flights, and perfectly brewed gourmet coffee, Western societies seem to be failing to deliver personal well-being. There is an epidemic of mental illness—especially anxiety and depression—and record figures of job dissatisfaction. In most countries levels of “life satisfaction” have remained stagnant even when incomes have been rising. The arrival of efficient online dating has been accompanied by divorce rates of around 40 percent.[v] More and more of our time is taken up managing a deluge of emails, texts, and tweets that keep us checking our phones, on average, 110 times a day, and which leave us in a state of continuous partial attention.[vi] All this is compounded by a sense that society is malfunctioning on a broader level, visible in increasing inequality, the rise of extremism, corrupt and ineffective politicians, and impending ecological collapse.

It is no surprise, then, that the self-help industry is in such excellent health, now valued at more than $10 billion annually in the United States alone: the search is on for new routes to a more fulfilling and meaningful life.[vii] The happiness gurus have been out in force proposing alternatives to the increasingly obsolete model of consumer culture that has brought comfort and pleasure to some but left so many others wondering if it was really worth working so hard, or getting into so much debt, to taste its delights. We might turn to positive psychology or life coaching, or maybe holistic medicine or voluntary simplicity. We could join a therapy group, try a stress-management course, or take solace in that ancient method known as religion. But among all these options, there is one that appears to have been largely overlooked: carpe diem. If we can rescue it from the hijackers, we might come to see it as a way to cut through the confusing array of possibilities by focusing our attention not so much on what we choose but that we choose.

We should be hopeful about the power of carpe diem, yet not become ideological zealots who believe that pursuing any one of its five forms will miraculously and automatically boost our well-being. It’s important to find the right balance between them and recognize when not to cultivate them. Seizing the day can, at times, be reckless, dangerous, or even immoral. It might be rash to leave a steady job to open up your dream café if you’ve got a big mortgage to repay. Hedonism can easily turn into excess, evident everywhere from gluttony among the ancient Romans to the Neknomination online binge drinking craze, where kudos come from being filmed downing whole pints of spirits.[viii] Think of how many carpe diem love affairs have led to broken marriages and divided families. And what about the bankers who seized opportunities for financial speculation that allowed them to make a killing while sparking the 2008 global financial crisis?

Seizing the day can also become an elite pursuit, open to the privileged few who have the economic means for risky decisions and adventurous choices. When my father emigrated as a refugee from Poland to Australia after World War II, and struggled to make ends meet, carpe diem living was a luxury he could not afford: it was security and stability that mattered to him. We also see certain differences across cultures. Decades of survey data reveal, for instance, that Swedes, New Zealanders, and Mexicans place more value on personal autonomy, and having the opportunity for self-expression and for making choices in their lives, than Bulgarians, Chinese, and Moroccans, who show a greater preference for economic and physical security. Such differences are due to many factors, such as poverty and inequality levels, religion, and political ideologies.[ix]

And let’s face it, seizing the day might be just too overwhelming or exhausting to keep up all the time. We all need distractions—even trashy TV—to help us unwind after a frustrating day at work or to keep our minds off relationship worries. Procrastination has its virtues too, shielding us from unwise and impulsive decisions that could wreak havoc with our lives. Seize-the-day passion and intensity may need to be tempered with a quieter, less zealous approach to life. As T. S. E...