memento mori
I finished reading the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. The book as a whole was just okay. And, I began drifting off in the last few chapters. They failed to hold my attention compared to the earlier ones.
However, the last chapter! How does Miley put it, “You came in like a wrecking ball!”
On the edge of death, we are reminded that none of this matters. So live.
It’s maybe life’s biggest life hack. Recognize we are all going to die so that we may free ourselves to live. Memento mori.
Manson, the author, in the last chapter writes about how we humans have two different types of “selves.” Actually, looking back at the book, Manson pulls this concept from Ernest Becker’s book, The Denial of Death.
The first self is the physical self—the one that eats, sleeps, shits.
The second self is our identity—how we see ourselves.
The argument is thus: whether we spend much time contemplating death or not, our “physical self” will eventually die. This scares us. So to compensate, we create a conceptual self that will live forever.
For example, the best living conceptual self creator is Elon Musk. If, scratch that, when Musk makes interplanetary living possible for humans, Musk’s name will not be forgotten for thousands of years. His conceptual self lives on. It’s what Becker called our immortality projects.
Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, Shakespeare, all really good at immortality projects. They crushed it.
The point is this… Manson writes all meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die. And when our immortality projects fail, or die out eventually, so do we.
As Macklemore rapped and paraphrased from possibly Hemingway, struggling with the same concept in his song Glorious:
I heard you die twice, once when they bury you in the grave
And the second time is the last time that somebody mentions your name
So when I leave here on this earth, did I take more than I gave?
Did I look out for the people or did I do it all for fame?We are all driven by a fear to care too much, because that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.
Beck argued from this death bed apparently, that people’s immortality projects were actually the problem. Death is inevitable. We should not avoid this realization, and once we come to terms with the fact that we MUST DIE, we are then free to choose our values foregoing dogmatic positions.
This is all found in the last chapter of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck which beckoned me to ask…
What do I value?
My answer: My family. My time. My freedom.
Whenever anything interferes with my family, my time, or my freedom, it angers me.
Oddly enough, or ironic, Idk, but the one controllable thing, the one cure to protecting my family, my time, and my freedom, is money.
You can’t take money with you when you die.
But while living, to truly not give a f*ck, take care of family, own your own time without any person or entity telling you how to live, is to have a shit-ton of money. Current financial bro consensus is $5 million cash because you can live off 4% annually while it continues to compound.
Definitely NOT there yet.
But when you die, and we all die, the money is gone. And when your “immortality project” finally dies, welp, you’re dead the second time. Truly dead. Not “mostly dead,” like Westley in The Princess Bride, but all the way dead, dead.
What have we learned, here?
For true freedom, true liberty, true living, we must be reminded that we must die.
This frees us to reprioritize values, casting fear aside (because we’re all going to die anyway), so we are free to live our best lives!
Happy Independence Day Weekend, homies!
Memento Mori!
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imaged, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
—Henry David Thoreau
Godspeed,
R. Brandon Long
