So does carpe diem pass the morality test? Can we give it a social conscience? The three rules of thumb, based on a rather unorthodox fusion of existentialism, liberal thought and development economics, might serve as a beginning. Their purpose is less to be precise guidelines than act as mental prompts to raise our levels of self-awareness. They can help us pause for thought so we consider the consequences of our individual seize-the-day actions, and how they might affect the world beyond ourselves.
That is easily said. But if we’re constantly checking the morality of our choices, doesn’t this conflict with the whole action-oriented ethos of carpe diem? I’m not saying we should immerse ourselves in days of angst-filled moral deliberation every time we are thinking of seizing the day – by the time we have made a decision, the day may well have passed. Rather, I’m saying that we should aim to develop a discerning ‘double awareness’: to become aware of the moments of choice that emerge in our daily lives, and to be just as aware of the wider impact they may have. Only then will we be doing justice both to our own sense of freedom and the freedom of others.
IF SEIZING THE DAY IS SO GOOD FOR US, WHY DON’T WE
DO IT MORE?
It’s not hard to see the value of carpe diem: life is short and the clock is ticking, so let’s take action now and grasp the possibilities before us, otherwise we might end our days looking back with regret at all the paths not taken. But if seizing the day is so obviously good for us, why don’t we do it more? Even if we judge some particular action as worthwhile, and are morally comfortable with it, why do we so often find ourselves failing to live up to the Nike slogan by just not doing it?
There are clearly different kinds of barriers at work. De Beauvoir was especially sensitive to one form of obstacle: the structures of power and inequality in society that place limits on our choices. In The Second Sex she argued that the patriarchal system that women are born into – the expectations they grow up with about what they should look like, how they should behave, and the roles they play as mothers, wives and sexual objects – comprises a web of constraints that stand in the way of making free choices. Women are historically gendered beings who must continually struggle to escape from this web or situation.16 In the contemporary world there are many such factors that constrain carpe diem living, such as poverty, racism, and religious and age discrimination. If, like an old neighbour of mine, you work double shifts as a forklift truck driver to support your family and elderly parents, and can barely make ends meet, then the idea of following your dream of opening a beach café in Thailand is going to seem hopelessly utopian.
Alongside such socioeconomic obstacles, which can be extremely difficult to overcome, is a set of four psychological barriers that are certainly formidable but may be easier to surmount: procrastination, overload, risk and apathy.
Procrastination is the arch-enemy of carpe diem. This is evident in its etymology: pro is the Latin for ‘forward’, while crastinus means ‘belonging to tomorrow’. Put them together and we get ‘forward it to tomorrow’, or more colloquially, ‘I’ll do it later’. This sentiment is the precise opposite of Horace’s ode, which urges us to ‘leave as little as possible for tomorrow’. Procrastination has always been with us. Horace’s near contemporary, Seneca, believed that ‘postponement is the greatest waste of life’.17 Even earlier, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod warned, ‘Do not put your work off till tomorrow or the day after, for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn’.18 Today, most of us are experts at failing to fill our barns, in one way or another. We put off doing our tax return, writing a college essay or finishing off the DIY. We never get around to signing up for that course or making that phone call. And it can be damaging: one US study revealed that procrastinating on doing taxes resulted in more than $450 million of overpayments in a single year because people rushed and made mistakes, while delaying medical check-ups – for instance, having a prostate or breast cancer test – can be deadly.19
There are undoubtedly times when postponement is a wise move: you might defer making a decision to buy a house because you’re waiting for the surveyor’s report, or because house prices are predicted to fall in the coming months. In a strict psychological sense this doesn’t count as procrastination, as true procrastination is not functional, being defined as ‘to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay’. It’s a phenomenally widespread affliction, chronically affecting 15–20% of adults, 95% of whom wish they could reduce it.20
Why delay something if we think doing so will make us worse off? The most extensive academic investigation of procrastination, based on an analysis of 691 separate studies, concluded – unsurprisingly – that a whole range of factors come into play.21 For a start, twin studies show that 22% of procrastination is genetically determined, so there’s not much you can do about that. What about the remaining 78%? There are certain tasks we delay, like filing our taxes, because we simply don’t take pleasure in doing them, or the deadline is so far off that it doesn’t feel urgent, so we leave it until the last moment. But there are other actions – which tend to be less time-bound, and often relate to bigger life decisions – that we generally postpone due to fear of failure or a lack of self-confidence. We don’t ask someone out on a date because we fear rejection, or we perpetually postpone handing in our notice at work since we’re worried we won’t find another job.
The most important research finding may be that procrastination is on the increase. We all know the main reason: the temptations of digital technology. There is probably no better way to delay getting on with something than checking our phone, having a quick look at some emails, and peeking at our social media feeds. Doing so this morning led me to start writing forty-three minutes later than I had planned. Taking this figure as typical of my daily working pattern, I have already spent at least 21,500 minutes not writing this book.
A close cousin of procrastination, which scuppers our carpe diem intentions, is choice overload. Its most obvious manifestation is in consumer culture: you want to buy a pair of jeans, and even in a single shop are faced not just with multiple colours and fabrics, but options for straight leg, stretch, slim fit, skinny and flared. The human brain, which is not designed to deal effectively with such an abundance of options, freezes up into indecision, and you walk out frustrated and empty-handed. Psychologist Barry Schwartz calls it the ‘paradox of choice’: more choices can lead to decision paralysis. He believes the problem extends far beyond shopping, pervading areas ranging from sex and friendship to religious observance and career choice.22 How are you supposed to make a career change when there are websites listing thousands of job categories? And if you do eventually decide to retrain as a psychotherapist, which type will you go for – humanistic, psychodynamic, integrative, existential or some other brand? In the end you may make no decision because you don’t want to regret making the ‘wrong’ decision. The diem remains uncarped.
Schwartz offers two main strategies for confronting choice overload. First, voluntarily constrain your choices: don’t spend all afternoon shopping for jeans, just let yourself visit two shops and set a time limit of one hour. Second, become a satisficer rather than a maximiser, lowering your expectations by making ‘good enough’ choices.23 You don’t need the perfect jeans – just buy a pair that are good enough and get on with your life. That seems fine when you’re thinking about your wardrobe. But what about when it comes to the more profound issues of existence? Here, too, there might be good reasons to embrace imperfection. The idea of being a ‘good enough parent’ saves many new parents from worrying that they are failing in their task and feeling guilty for not being a ‘better’ parent. And if you wait too long for the perfect job to turn up, you may never make a change. Yet I’m not sure, when I’m a crumbling old man, that I want to look back and think that my life – my relationship with my family, my career, my political commitment – had been merely ‘good enough’. I aspire to something more, a sense that I had m
ade the most of the possibilities and grasped what I could from the human adventure before I end up six feet underground. And that may require taking risks.
What do we know about risk, the third barrier to seizing the day? The scientific study of risk has been a booming industry over the past three decades, producing a star-studded cast of Nobel laureates and stock market prophets. Amongst its major findings is that we are far from being rational creatures and display numerous ‘cognitive biases’ that skew the way we assess risk. One of these, known as ‘loss aversion’, is that when faced with uncertainty, we tend to exaggerate potential losses relative to gains. In fact, experimental studies reveal that we hate losing about twice as much as we like winning. So imagine you are offered a gamble on the toss of a coin. If the coin falls tails you will lose $100. For you to accept the gamble, you would probably need to be offered a win of at least $200 if the coin falls heads – $100 or even $150 wouldn’t be enough to entice most people.24 The practical impact of loss aversion is that it breeds an inherent caution in our decision-making and a bias toward seeking security. This may have been a useful evolutionary trait when our early ancestors encountered a succulent new berry that could potentially poison them, but is of less use in the current day when it might serve to focus our attention on everything that could possibly go wrong if we decided to move to Berlin. When faced with a seize-the-day choice, it’s worth remembering that your brain might be pulling you toward taking the safe option.
Another important cognitive bias, first described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as the ‘availability’ bias, states that we make decisions based on more recent and accessible information that is easily retrievable from our memories. If you’ve just read about a plane crash in the newspaper, then you are likely to be more cautious about flying for a time until memory of the incident fades from your mind.25 Similarly, if you are thinking of going freelance and know several people who recently did so but severely struggled, this is likely to have an exaggerated impact on your decision-making. This doesn’t mean we should ignore their experiences: talking to them about how they ended up working 80-hour weeks is probably more informative than getting sage advice from a career counsellor. Yet we should still ask ourselves how factors like ‘availability’ might be deterring us from (or sometimes luring us toward) carpe diem choices.
It is easy to be seduced by the neat experimental findings of behavioural psychologists like Kahneman and forget that our attitudes toward risk are shaped just as much by waves of cultural change as by the biases built into our brains. Since the 1990s sociologists have been pointing out that Western societies are becoming increasingly risk-averse and seem to have elevated safety and caution into sacred ideals. It’s not just all the traffic rules that tell us how fast to drive or when we can walk across the road. The media stokes our fear of paedophiles who might snatch away our children, or creates panics that we might all be swept away by a global epidemic of Ebola. Then there is the insurance industry constantly urging us to protect ourselves from missed flights and heart disease, and a litigious culture that scares schools into cutting playtime in case children get injuries that might bring on an expensive lawsuit. As we get bombarded by all this ‘play it safe’ messaging, we begin to lose touch with Homo aleatorius, the part of our natures that craves the excitement of taking some gambles in life.26
Perhaps, most fundamentally, we should consider what I think of as our personal risk story. Here’s an example. A couple of nights ago in the pub a friend told me about an epiphany she experienced. She had been working as an arts producer in London for about ten years. But when running one project, where she met a number of self-employed producers, she suddenly had a startling revelation: that the reason she had stayed with her organisation for so long was due to an aversion to risk that was a product of her upbringing. She discovered that many of the freelance producers had parents with relatively high-risk, entrepreneurial jobs. Her own parents, by contrast, had steady careers – her father was in the army and her mother a teacher – and had essentially brought her up to avoid risk and stick with the secure option. It was a liberating moment, as she realised she was afraid of risk because her parents were, and the people she was working with were not because their parents were not. Everyone’s attitudes were shaped by their specific family history. The result? She left her job and went freelance, then later decided to move out of London to live with her boyfriend on a farm with 800 sheep. There is a lesson here that escapes the much-lauded science of risk: exploring our personal histories and narratives of risk may be an enlightening way of bringing more carpe diem into our lives. If you drew out your own risk story on a sheet of paper, what shape would it take and what patterns would you see?
Apathy, the final barrier to carpe diem action, has a bad reputation, a legacy of its association with the Christian deadly sin of sloth. We typically associate it with laziness and indifference. It’s the guy lying on the sofa in front of the telly who can’t even be bothered to pick up the remote control and switch channel even though he’s bored of what he’s watching. It’s the person who might think climate change is a problem but that it’s up to other people to do something about it, or maybe there’s no point anyway. It’s a kind of numbness to the world, reflected in the ancient Greek origin of apathy, meaning ‘without feeling’.
Psychologists often attribute apathy to stress, depression or a lack of meaning in life. I think the roots of apathy lie, most significantly, in a feeling of powerlessness. It’s a sense that our actions will make no difference, whether to our own lives, or to the wider world around us. This seems especially prevalent in politics, where we often remain passive spectators while corporations infiltrate the upper echelons of power, the biosphere is ravaged and politicians rule in their self-interest.
‘How did we acquire this superhuman passivity?’ asks the writer and activist George Monbiot.27 He and other critics have argued that the source of our apathetic response is that we are all too busy shopping and glued to home entertainment, and I think they’re generally right. But our failures to seize the day also reflect a sense of powerlessness – that the system is too big to change and that any actions of our own will be pathetically insignificant, the merest drop in the ocean. At this point, one might invoke the notion of solidarity. We can overcome apathy when we act together with others, whether locally with people we know, or as part of a larger group. That’s why people join running clubs: it’s the incentive of being part of a community of runners that helps get them out of bed on a Sunday morning. This goes for politics as well: we are far more likely to take to the streets if we think thousands of others are doing the same.
What most people don’t recognise, however, is that there may be an even more obvious cure for apathy: choice itself. Simply making a decision to act. Even if our actions might not make a huge difference to the wider world, making a choice by its nature changes us. It is an assertion of personal power. But how does choice actually transform and redefine us? And how do we put it into practice to overcome not only apathy but procrastination, risk and overload?
WE ARE WHAT WE CHOOSE
The characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot are masters of indecision. They plan and resolve, but a decisive choice is never made. It is an unmistakable theme in the final lines:
Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
[Stage directions:] They do not move.28
Waiting for Godot is a window on our lives. So often we fail to move. We know there are choices to make but somehow we are paralysed, inert or forever wavering in the sea of indecision. We might know that a relationship isn’t working, that a career is unfulfilling, or that we should visit our parents more often. The choices are there waiting to be taken, yet we frequently fail to seize the day and the possibilities drift away.
We can see our lives as a series of choices extending through time, each with the potential to shape not just what we do but who we are. I’m not talk
ing about the trivial choices of which brand of chocolate biscuits to buy or what jacket to wear on a night out, but the significant decisions that go to the core of our being. It is no surprise that life-defining moments of choice are a recurring theme in novels, plays and films. Think of Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, who must decide whether or not to save his Jewish factory workers, at risk to his own life. Or Neo choosing between the red pill and the blue pill in The Matrix. Or Amélie, who angsts over telling Nino that she loves him. ‘If you let this chance go by,’ an old man says to her, ‘eventually your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton.’ And then there’s that masterpiece of existential anomie, The Graduate. Elaine stands in the chapel aisle having just married a characterless jock, while staring at Ben who is screaming her name. She must make a carpe diem choice: to stay with her new husband, or to run away with Ben into a different life. She pauses, looks at the wedding guests around her – and then she runs.
The importance of choice as a route to a life of meaning was central to the thought of Viktor Frankl, one of the founders of existential psychotherapy in the 1940s. ‘What is a man?’ he asked. ‘He is a being who continually decides what he is.’29
Frankl’s simple statement is one of the most profound distillations of the carpe diem ideal I have ever encountered. The act of choosing reveals what we care about – it is a reflection of our worldviews, desires, priorities and fears. It is a mirror in which we can judge ourselves not just by our beliefs but by our actions, and which shows us the shifting contours of our identity. When you decide to train as an actor, rather than follow your parents’ advice to go into accountancy, you are saying something about who you are and what you value. In effect, you are asserting, ‘I am for acting,’ and ‘I value creativity’.30 Similarly, when you decide to go on your first political march, you add a new layer to your identity and reshape your personal narrative: you become an activist. The choice is now part of you. We are what we choose to do, or as Jean-Paul Sartre pithily proclaimed, ‘To be is to do.’31
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