Don’t live each day as if it’s your last
There’s more bad advice out in the world than could possibly be imagined, a near infinite heap of nonsense. One of the most frequently stated, and worst, of those pieces of advice is “live each day as if it’s your last”.
Sure, it sounds good at first, until you think about what it would be like if you actually did live each day as if it’s your last. You wouldn’t go to work, unless you really, really love your job. I doubt very much you would eat anything healthy, or do any chores. Drink or drugs might be involved, if that’s your thing, with no prospect of a hangover or comedown the next day. All the boring but necessary parts of life would be abandoned. It might be fun for a day or three, but you’d soon descend into a ill, broke, dishevelled mess.
I’m being facetious of course, but behind that facetiousness lays a semi-serious point. We need to be able to imagine, to plan for a future. It’s part of what keeps us going. The closest I’ve been in my life to living each day as if it’s my last was during my teen years and twenties. It wasn’t a conscious choice to live in the moment, I just genuinely couldn’t imagine a future.
I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, claiming I lived some kind of wild, debauched life. I lived in the moment in a fairly boring way, by just not taking any decisions that would particularly benefit my future. I didn’t pay into a pension or save up to buy a house, even though I understood on some level these were sensible things to do (my money went on gig tickets, and CDs, mainly). I didn’t exercise or make more than a token effort to try and eat healthily. I didn’t think about my career particularly, just turning up day after day to dead end jobs, because they were the path of least resistance, and allowed me the most time to indulge my leisure pursuits.
Was I happy, living this way? In moments, perhaps, but deep down, very much not. The reason I couldn’t imagine the future was ultimately down to low self-worth, and not being able to find a place for myself in the world. Somewhere around my late twenties, and I’m not totally sure how, I became just that little bit more confident. I applied for a semi-decent job, got it, then a year later met the women who would become my wife. We got married, had children, bought a house, learned to drive. I studied for a professional qualification, so I could have some kind of career. All those major life events that are expected of you, if not necessarily quite in the right order. Suddenly, imagining a future became quite easy, and the future I imagined was pretty pleasant (when I manage to shut out the prospect of climate and societal breakdown at least).
Living for today was no longer a problem, but I may have gone too far the other way. I spend a lot of time thinking about, and making decisions for, the future. Things we can do when we retire, or when the mortgage is paid off. Holidays we can take when the kids are older, or have left home completely. Jobs I can do when I need less flexibility around childcare, writing I can do when I have more time on my hands. I forget sometimes to enjoy the present, to appreciate a life which is, in the main, pretty good, certainly far better than I ever could have imagined twenty years ago. This is, of course, what they are really getting at when they say “Live each day as if it’s your last”. Enjoy today, and enjoy this moment.
So, don’t literally live each day as if it is your last, because it almost certainly won’t be. Equally don’t put off every pleasure, or every bold decision until tomorrow. By the time you’re middle-aged like me, you’ve most likely lost enough people to know that the future you are waiting for, that you’ve been carefully planning for, might or might not arrive.
