Memento Mori

Memento Mori

Let’s do a thought experiment.

Clear your mind. Imagine you’re eighty years old and nearing the end of your life. Maybe you have a couple years left, maybe just a couple hours. You’re sitting on a park bench on a beautiful fall day overlooking a river. You hear the birds migrating above, the water flowing in the river, and the leaves falling off trees and gliding gently to the ground. Families are walking by, with parents holding the hands of their toddlers.

Take as long as you want. There is no rush.

Now think deeply. What’s going on in the life you’re imagining? Who are the people in it? In what ways have you influenced them? What have you done for them? How have you made them feel? What are the things you’ve accomplished? What possessions do you have? What matters most as you approach your final days? What seems unimportant? What memories do you cherish? What are the things you regret? What do your friends say about you? What about your family?

Shifting our perspective to the end of life can help us gain insight into what really matters. It can help us become wiser. When we look back at the present through the lens of our life ending, the fears and desires that occupy our attention in the present moment get pushed aside to make room for things that have greater meaning for our lives as a whole. Steve Jobs put the idea this way:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.1

This shift in our perspective allows us to turn our future hindsight into our current foresight. It gives us a map we can use to navigate into the future. For many of us, looking at life this way reveals that our current direction isn’t fully aligned with where we want to end up. Seeing that is a good thing! Knowing you’re heading in the wrong direction is the first step toward getting back on course. When you get clear on what really matters, you can start asking yourself, “Am I making the right use of my limited time?”2

Jobs had a daily ritual. Every morning he would look in the mirror and ask himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”3 Whenever the answer was no too many days in a row, he said, he knew he needed to change something. At one point in my own life, I began performing the same ritual. It was part of the reason I eventually decided to leave the intelligence agency. We all have bad days, but when the answer to Jobs’s question is no day after day, week after week, it’s time to make a change.

When you did this exercise, you probably thought of your relationships. Maybe it was the time you and your spouse cried on the couch together, had a romantic weekend, or walked along a beach holding hands. Maybe it was your wedding. Or maybe it was a time you experienced pure joy with your kids. Maybe it was the time you were there for a friend or the time they were there for you.

Or perhaps your mind went toward your regrets—the opportunities you could have taken but didn’t: the dreams you didn’t chase, the business you didn’t start, the love you didn’t leap at, the trip you didn’t go on, the way you held yourself back because you didn’t want to get hurt, the time you were scared to do something different because you might look like a fool.

Jeff Bezos uses a similar thought experiment:

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” … I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried [Amazon]. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.4

Regret can outlast the immediate pain of a failed attempt. Fear of failure can also keep us from choices we would later be glad to have tried.5

Possessions become less important for what they are than for what they enable. I’m guessing that, in the thought exercise, you didn’t think of your house as an investment. If it came to mind, it was probably in the context of the relationships and the memories—the family dinners, the laughs, the tears, the parties, the time you stayed in bed all day with your partner, the board game battles, the marks in the doorway that recorded how tall your kids were at each age.

I’m guessing you didn’t think of the time you watched Breaking Bad, The Mandalorian, or The Bachelor. You probably didn’t think of all the time you spent commuting and the extra podcasts or audiobooks you got to listen to. Perhaps you thought instead about how at least some of that time could have been used connecting with family and friends, or writing that book you always wanted to write.

You might remember the times you fell short of the person you wanted to be—we all have done so at one point or another. Perhaps it was the time you sent an inappropriate email, or the time you lost control of your emotions and yelled at someone you love. Maybe it was the time you said something you didn’t mean just to cause a reaction in the other person because you didn’t know how, in that moment, to tell them you loved them or how scared you were. Or perhaps it was the time someone said they needed you, and you were too busy with your own priorities to help.

You might think of the impact—or lack of it—that you had on your community, your city, your country, or the world. You might think of your health. Did you do everything you could to prepare your body to live to eighty, ninety, one hundred? Did you take care of yourself so you could take care of others?

What we think of as defining moments, like promotions or a new house, matter less to life satisfaction than the accumulation of tiny moments that didn’t seem to matter at the time. In the end, everyday moments matter more than big prizes. Tiny delights over big bright lights.