Memento mori is the single most clarifying idea available to aman who has lost track of what matters.And most men have lost track of what matters. They spendtheir days on things that, measured against the brevity of life, are not worth the time they consume. They postpone thethings that matter most - the relationships, the meaningfulwork, the experiences they keep meaning to have - on theunexamined assumption that there will be time later. Theylive as though their supply of days were infinite, allocatingthem carelessly, wasting them on trivia, deferring theimportant indefinitely into a future that they assume willalways arrive. And then, one day, the future stops arriving, and the deferred important things are deferred forever, andthe trivia turn out to have consumed a life.This is the default human condition, and it is a disaster.The problem is not that men do not know they will die.Everyone knows, abstractly, that they will die. The problem isthat the knowledge is abstract - held at arm's length, acknowledged in theory but never allowed to actually informdaily life. The man knows he will die the way he knows the sunis ninety-three million miles away: as a fact that is true but hasno felt reality, no impact on how he spends his Tuesdayafternoon. Memento mori is the practice of closing the gapbetween the abstract knowledge and the felt reality - ofallowing the certainty of death to actually inform how thedays are spent.When the certainty of death becomes real - not morbid, not paralyzing, but real - everything changes. The trivia thatconsumed so much time reveal themselves as trivia and fallaway. The important things that were endlessly deferredacquire urgency. The petty grievances that occupied so muchmental space shrink to their actual size, which is tiny, measured against the deadline that frames everything. Theman who has made death real to himself wastes less time, postpones less, complains less, and lives more - because hehas internalized, at the level of felt reality, that the supply ofdays is limited and the meter is running.The modern man needs this practice more than men ofprevious eras did, because the modern world is engineered tohelp him forget. Death has been hidden away - in hospitals, in nursing homes, behind professional services that handlethe dying and the dead so that most people can go through liferarely encountering either. The culture is saturated withdistraction designed to keep the mind occupied witheverything except the one fact that would clarify it. Themodern man can go years without ever seriously confrontinghis own mortality, anesthetized by an endless stream ofentertainment, consumption, and busyness. Memento mori isthe deliberate reversal of this anesthesia. It is the choice toremember what the culture is engineered to help you forget.The remembering is uncomfortable. It is also the beginning ofactually living.
