A well-lived life means wasting some time

I regularly get letters from readers. I very much appreciate these; thank you so much for sending them! I am glad my writing is making a difference. But yesterday I received a social media DM that made me pause and think. The writer told me that I should live my life to the fullest, and he advised that I should, as he did, live as if each day was my last.

This is a bad piece of advice, though it sounds intuitively sensible. For one thing, it cannot be literally true. The final day of someone's life is rarely their best day, so it's not something we should literally strive for. It seems things are more enjoyable when we think they will last forever. Some of the sweetest memories of youth are those where we believed things would go on forever; for example, the summer holidays spent in the countryside with grandparents, when we believed these elderly people as immortal as our school years were eternal.

But how about a less literal meaning? The advice then sounds eminently sensible: pack your life full of meaning, as if you only have little time left. The memento mori calendar (pictured) uses this idea, letting you color in all the weeks you've lived. It optimistically goes up until age eighty. The calendar's makers promise that it will give you “improved focus, a heightened perspective on life, and a rush of motivation to take consistent action.”

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