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It’s Counting Down For Each Of Us
Daily Stoic
Torick potvin
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Oct 9 at 2:05 AM
There’s a haunting series of the last known photos of celebrities. You can see Prince getting in an SUV hours before he overdosed on fentanyl in an elevator. You can see Michael Jackson rehearsing for a tour he would never go on. You can see John Lennon signing an autograph for the fan that murdered him. You can see Marilyn Monroe posing happily with a friend just days before her death. You can see Anton Yelchin’s last photos smiling at a premiere two months before he was crushed by a car in his own driveway.
As it was written in Gilgamesh:
“Man is snapped off like a reed in the canebrake!
The comely young man, the pretty young woman—
All too soon in their prime Death abducts them!”
It is true for famous people. It is true for the ordinary. It’s even true for animals. Here is a 44 year old white rhino at a zoo in Kenya that was the last of his species. He was the end of the line waiting for the end of the line.
It’s not just that we will all be snapped off. The Stoics would add that we are constantly being snapped off. Yes, there will ultimately be a final photo of each us, but also each photo you take is the last time you will be that person. Death isn’t something that happens once, finally, it’s also happening constantly. Look through your phone right now, that photo at your wedding was the last time you were single, it was the last time you were the parent of a three year old, it was the last time you’ll visit Hawaii.
Each of those photos is a dot in your life. A dot you’ll never get back. This should serve as a reminder to not obsess over trivialities, or to worry too much about what people think of us, to try to make more money than we could ever spend, or make plans far off in the future. All these are negated by death. It’s time we stop pretending otherwise.
Which is one of the ideas behind our newest way to keep this powerful reminder in your daily life - the Daily Stoic Memento Mori Calendar.
The calendar has 4,160 dots - each dot representing a week in your life and each row representing two years. By scratching off the Memento Mori Calendar every week, you will not only see how much life you’ve already lived (or as Seneca says, how much you’ve already died), but also how much life you’ve (hopefully) got left.
Each week, as you scratch off a new dot, it’s an invitation to take inventory of the life you’re living. The choices you’re making. The choices you’re not making.
Memento Mori - remember you must die. It’s time to treat our time as a gift and not waste it on the trivial and vain. Each photo could be your last.
It is reminders like this one that we desperately need in our own lives—a thought or an idea that we’d rather ignore, do everything to avoid and pretend it is not true.
Learn the history of Memento Mori here.
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