Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  Maude is an example of a death gazer, someone who decides to seize the day after coming face to face with death. The encounter with their mortality wakes them up to the possibilities of human existence, helps them rethink what is really important, and compels them to seize opportunities and live life to the fullest. It can happen when someone discovers they have a terminal illness, but may also occur following a near-death experience – like surviving a car accident.

  Are death gazers like Maude unusual in their response to death? Not at all. Psychologists have a name for it: ‘post-traumatic growth’. This expanding field of research looks at how traumatic events, particularly close shaves with death, can have a positive impact on people’s lives. One of the major findings is that such events are more likely to trigger growth experiences than result in psychiatric disorders such as depression.11 Some people become more caring and empathic, while others have spiritual awakenings. But one of the most prevalent effects is that it induces a carpe diem zest for life. People abandon their tedious jobs, embark on bonding travel adventures with their children or, like Maude, dedicate themselves to taking chances and squeezing every ounce of experience out of being alive. While for many individuals – perhaps around half – the traumatic event has no major impact on how they choose to live, for others it is a major turning point.12

  A study of over 200 people who had survived life-threatening dangers such as drowning, traffic accidents, mountain climbing falls and serious illness revealed that around one in four of them developed a sense of the preciousness of life and a desire to live more fully, reassess their priorities and take more risks (including in social relationships).13 Gazing at death made them realise that life was short and that they had been taking it for granted. A similar message appeared in a recent viral YouTube video featuring a woman who was diagnosed with brain cancer and given six months to live. ‘Seize the day,’ she urged. ‘What’s important to you? What do you care about? What matters? Pursue that. Forget the rest.’14 Maude would surely have agreed.

  Occasionally post-traumatic growth happens on a mass scale. The Roaring Twenties, known as a period of wild and exuberant living, flowered as a response to the horrors of World War One. Millions of soldiers had seen the face of death on an unimaginable scale in the trenches, and witnessed their compatriots suffer and die before their eyes. ‘Here was a new generation,’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, ‘grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken’. The result was an outbreak of carpe diem vitality, where grabbing new opportunities and live-for-the-moment hedonism were the rule of the day.

  Not everyone, however, was partying during the Jazz Age. Just as some 20% of US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, World War One veterans had their own version, referred to with the inadequate term ‘shell shock’. Many never recovered.15

  So gazing at death can be a mixed blessing. But if, like Maude, you can psychologically survive the ordeal, it may open your mind to a new possibility: that life is not only full of individual moments of opportunity, but is itself a window of opportunity that flashes into existence just once and is there for the taking. After all, as Maude says, we’re given life to find it out.

  THE ADDICTIVE THRILL OF BEING SHOT AT

  Vietnam, Cambodia, Congo, El Salvador, Uganda, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, the Six-Day War. In a career spanning more than thirty years, British photographer Don McCullin took extraordinary risks with his life to cover some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts. His images of the horrors and suffering of war, mainly published in the Sunday Times Magazine from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, were etched on the minds of a generation. He didn’t go to Vietnam just once. He went more than fifteen times, somehow dodging the bullets as soldiers got blown to pieces around him, wading through canals filled with bloated corpses, and sleeping in rat-infested holes as sniper fire honed in on him. In Cambodia, under attack from the Khmer Rouge, he escaped with his life when an AK-47 bullet wedged itself into his Nikon F camera, just millimetres from his skull. In Uganda, he was imprisoned by Idi Amin’s feared security forces and was lucky to be deported after four days while dozens of people in the surrounding cells were brutally executed.

  McCullin approached photography as a carpe diem craft. His ambition was to seize opportunities to capture – with a click of his camera – fleeting moments of violence, terror, poverty, and sometimes love and comradeship. A man playing the mandolin over the body of a dead girl in Lebanon. A soldier throwing a grenade like an Olympic athlete, an instant before being shot. To catch the wind of opportunity, McCullin travelled to some of the most volatile and perilous places on the planet, drawn by an uncanny instinct that deposited him in the right place at the right time. In 1961 he sensed that Berlin was going to explode and immediately went there, arriving just in time for the Berlin Wall crisis, which became a turning point in the Cold War. Upon setting foot in a conflict zone he usually headed straight for ‘where the close combat seemed to be at its bloodiest’.16 In the Congo, he disguised himself as a mercenary to reach the killing fields of Stanleyville and could easily have been put in front of a firing squad when his high-risk deception was discovered by a local military commander. All in an effort to get the best pictures.

  Don McCullin at an exhibition of his own war photographs, 2005.

  McCullin was a seize-the-day daredevil, someone whose efforts to create and grasp opportunities involve courting death and danger. This contrasts with the death gazer, whose carpe diem mentality is born from an accidental or undesired encounter with death, rather than a willed intention to dance with it. But what drives a daredevil like McCullin? What rewards could possibly make it worthwhile to take such extreme risks? He describes it this way:

  When I go home and sleep in my own bed, I soon become restless… My wars, the way I’ve lived, is like an incurable disease. It is like the promise of a tremendous high and the certainty of a bad dream. It is something I both fear and love, but it’s something I can’t do without. I cannot do without the head-on collision with life I have when I am working.17

  This is war as an addiction, a drug; the adrenalin rush that comes with danger and makes him feel fully alive. ‘I wouldn’t like to go through a year without being in a war,’ he once said.18 Although clearly driven by a humanitarian desire to expose the horrific reality of warfare, as well as a dose of career ambition, McCullin repeatedly uses the word ‘excitement’ to describe the attraction of his work. ‘I thought it was an amazing kind of excitement to lay under a barrage of shells dropping on me or a sniper trying to get me,’ he revealed in one interview.19 Sometimes it would transform almost into a type of insanity. After two weeks in a deadly battle while embedded with US marines in Vietnam, ‘in the end I became totally mad, free, running around like a tormented animal’.20 The result was that he took some of his most celebrated photographs. For all his fame, the toll on his family life was severe. His first wife, Christine, always hated his job. ‘Work was not only the enemy – it was the other woman, so to speak, as well,’ he admitted. ‘Christine was always there for me, but she couldn’t win in the end.’21 Their marriage eventually fell apart.

  McCullin is long-retired and now haunted by what he witnessed in war, a living casualty of his own carpe diem drive. He is at the extreme end of the daredevil category, but is certainly not alone in his quest for excitement. Rock climbers, racing drivers, sky divers, polar explorers and many others take substantial risks in order to gain themselves a taste of intense aliveness. It is an ideal that goes back to pre-modern hunting culture, where the thrill of the chase – picture Native Americans pursuing bison herds on horseback across the Great Plains – was often just as much a reward as the meat it provided. As a carpe diem philosophy of life it may be best expressed by the high-wire walker Philippe Petit, who in 1974 traversed the forty-three metres between the Twin Towers in New York City on an inch-thick cable, devoid of any safety e
quipment:

  To me, it’s really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope.22

  Petit may encourage us to embrace risk as a part of life and not be afraid to take opportunities that induce fear and uncertainty. But don’t we all naturally want to minimise risk and follow the safest path available? Not according to risk scholar John Adams. He argues that taking risks is part of what makes us human and that we all have an inbuilt ‘need for excitement’. Homo prudens, zero-risk man, is just one element of our characters. ‘Homo aleatorius – dice man, gambling man, risk-taking man – also lurks in every one of us,’ he writes. Even the most risk-averse person has it within themselves, having once been a toddler learning to walk, where each wobbling step was a gamble. And imagine a life without any risk whatsoever, whether in our relationships, at work or in our leisure activities. ‘Too much certainty is boring, unrewarding and belittling,’ says Adams.23 It diminishes us and cossets us in a cotton-wool existence that robs us of the rewards of excitement and challenge.

  This is not to say that we should all sign up to become tightrope walkers or war photographers, but that we ought to recognise that opportunities in life necessarily involve taking risks, and that too much caution might not be good for our existential health. It’s a topic I will return to in a later chapter, when exploring the cognitive biases that draw us toward seeking security rather than risk. But for now it is worth recalling a phrase we often hear children saying to one another: ‘I dare you’. Perhaps they understand something fundamental about the human condition and what makes us thrive, which many adults may have forgotten.

  Having now met the daredevil, the death gazer and the experimentalist, it is time to announce the entrance of a fourth character who finds ways to catch the winds of opportunity: the role breaker.

  PINK FLOYD AND THE FIRE-WALKING GRANNY

  An ancient idea in Western social thought is to view society as a theatre in which human beings are like actors on a stage set, playing roles ranging from the comic to the tragic. This theatrum mundi tradition goes back to Plato and the idea that we resemble puppets whose lives are scripted by the Gods. Shakespeare developed the theme, declaring that ‘all the world’s a stage’ on which each of us ‘plays his part’. For the last half century sociologists specialising in ‘role theory’ have used the metaphor of social life as a drama to explore how we present ourselves to other people and get caught in particular narratives. This vision of ourselves as characters in a play resonates with the original meaning of the word ‘person’, which comes from the Latin persona, an actor’s mask. We are all, in some sense, wearing masks.24 And these masks, I believe, can affect our capacity to seize the day.

  Stop for a moment and think of the different roles you play in daily life: the dutiful daughter, the perfect mother, the sober lawyer, the life of the party, the loyal friend, the sullen teenager, the maverick entrepreneur, the tortured artist, the good provider, the charming host, the chilled dude or the serious intellectual. You readily switch between roles, depending on whether you are at a work meeting, a stag night or playing with your children. Each role has its own socially recognised personality and expectations, and comes with specific ways of speaking, acting, body language, clothing and emotional expression. As the life of the party you’re bubbly and chatty, telling jokes, filling up glasses and dragging people onto the dance floor. As the dutiful daughter you are the one who regularly visits your elderly mother in the care home (your siblings rarely bother). As the perfect mother you always put your kids before your career, and ensure they’re looking immaculate for the visit to your in-laws. I know that when I go home to visit my parents in Sydney I quickly revert to an old childhood role in which I am uncharacteristically lazy and let my parents do most of the cooking and cleaning while I sit around watching more television than is good for me. It happens every time. And I’m forty-five.

  There is nothing inherently wrong with playing roles, but it is important to notice when the roles start to play us. Over time, the different characters we inhabit sometimes seep into our unconscious, shaping the way we talk, think and act. A management consultant I met, who spent several years working at one of the world’s top firms in his twenties, told me how his role began to take over his personality:

  I became completely trapped in the narrative of what it meant to be a management consultant. In meetings when we were kickstarting a new project, I said what I was supposed to say about my personal development goals – ‘in this project I want to be taking on more responsibility’, things like that. Things that you didn’t really believe or care about, but it was expected of you. Then like everyone else I started going skiing for my holidays, because that’s what all the other consultants did. It was part of the image, being sporty and a bit macho. At first you know that you’re playing a role but then the narrative becomes part of you and it all starts to become ‘normal’.25

  Similarly, someone playing the role of ‘charming host’ might typically greet people with a warm handshake and look them in the eye, ask them how their family is and chat amiably about holiday plans, while making sure not to reveal any personal distaste he might have for a particular guest and keeping any emotional turmoil going on in his life to himself. While the charming host would most likely deny that he is ‘controlled’ by his role and following a script, it is telling that an outside observer could probably predict most of this behaviour: it’s the socially recognised formula of what a charming host does.

  When such patterns of behaviour become so ingrained that we don’t even notice them, an interesting question arises: How authentic are we being in the various roles we play? It was a question famously asked by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Being and Nothingness, where he describes a café waiter who seems to be acting a role. His movements are exaggerated – he bends forward to his customers just a bit too eagerly – and his voice and facial expression are almost too solicitous. ‘He is playing at being a waiter in a café,’ writes Sartre, ‘there is nothing there to surprise us.’26 In other words, he is not really being himself. He is almost a caricature of a waiter. He is not free.

  Most waiters I know are scarcely as fawning and role-bound as the Parisian variety encountered by Sartre, yet there is compelling evidence that social roles can powerfully shape our behaviour. Amongst the best-known examples of this is the Stanford Prison Experiment devised by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971. Twenty-four psychologically stable students were given roles of prison guard or prisoner in a mock jail, yet within just a few days the guards became sadistic (such as by physically abusing inmates) and the prisoners became acutely distressed, with some screaming or crying uncontrollably. It got so out of hand that the experiment had to be halted after only six days, rather than the planned two weeks. Although an extreme case, it is revealing of the way we readily internalise roles.27

  But what does all this have to do with seizing the day? Allow Eve Hoare to explain. When in her seventies, she was interviewed for a project I ran in Oxford about how people change the course of their lives. ‘The best years have been from the age of sixty to seventy,’ she said. Why?

  I really grew, because when I was sixty-two I went on a life assessment course and suddenly realised I didn’t know who I was. I had been the obedient child, worker, wife, teacher, mother. I was always my roles. It was a real shock.28

  The training course involved physical challenges as well as offering tools for self-reflection. Participants had to descend several hundred feet down a steep cliff, cross a ravine, jump into the sea from about thirty feet, and do a fire-walk across twenty yards of burning coals. Eve, who eventually became an assistant on the course, did the fire-walk seven times. The real learning, though, was recognising that she had been playing roles that, on reflection, did not seem to be
fully of her own choosing. From a young age she had been a dutiful carer for her unwell mother, and gave up a scholarship to study at Edinburgh University in order to look after her when she had a nervous breakdown. Eve became a shorthand typist, then a housewife for ten years, and later worked as a primary school teacher to support her family.

  Following her revelation about roles, Eve’s life began to open up and she started to seize the day with incredible vigour. She went to college and studied literature, took to writing poetry and painting, did volunteer work in Bosnia with children who had been injured in the war, and joined a friendship network to support terminally ill people.

  I came to realise that if you don’t enjoy the way you live, you ought to change it straight away, which is why I retired from teaching… You can just see how some young people get the balance wrong, not realising they should make the most of their precious years. I feel I have a mission to make other people see that they should grab every opportunity there is, that life goes by so quickly.29

  She likes to quote Pink Floyd’s song ‘Time’, especially the part about how we can miss the starting gun in life. Eve Hoare took a long time to hear the starting gun, but once she did she sprinted. What broke the silence? Coming to understand how social roles had shaped her life, and limited her choices and personal vision. In the end, she became a role breaker and gave herself a new kind of freedom on a different stage.