For much of my life, I’ve heard the idea that we should live every day as if it were our last. The most recent reference I heard was in Steve Jobs’s famous 2005 Stanford commencement address: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” After all these years of remembering that idea and trying, without success, to understand how to apply it, I came across one of its original authors. Apparently, the idea is attributed to Stoicism, to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

I read Seneca about twenty years ago; I was looking for comfort to help me get through existence. I’ll admit I found it, because even today I catch myself living in a way influenced by his philosophy of a calm, unfussy life. I don’t live for pleasures or die for them, but when they come my way, they are welcome. This is a paraphrase of Seneca in his treatise On the Happy Life. The idea has served me well, because throughout life it hasn’t only been difficult to live in the present; it has also been hard to enjoy, with peace of mind, the good things life has brought. And since suffering usually comes from the resistance we put up against reality, as Alan Watts says, it was a great find to come across this other idea from Seneca: “We must endure the things common to mortals, and not let ourselves be disturbed by what is beyond our power to avoid. We were born into a kingdom; to obey god is freedom.” A small caveat here: for Seneca, as I understand him, ‘god’ is everything that is possible: everything that fits within nature. So if you’re walking along and the bird just had its moment as it crossed paths with you, well, yes, that’s possible too… and it’s better not to let it throw you off.

To get back to the topic that brought us here: in Seneca, I never found a verbatim reference to living each day as if it were the last, although in his writings he circles around it. Only recently, reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, did I find it as such, accompanied by a little context:

“The perfection of character consists in this: to live each day as if it were the last, without agitation, without apathy, and without pretense.” [My translation from the Spanish]

I wish I had read this complete idea during my years of depression. Marcus Aurelius suggests a purpose for living each day as if it were our last: to perfect our character; and second, he suggests how to do it: “without agitation, without apathy, and without pretense.” These ideas don’t give us the absolute key to living in the present, but at least they tell us the how and the what for, and that is already a good guide.

During my depression, a period that belongs to a distant, almost foreign past, living each day as if it were the last came from hopelessness, from not believing the future would bring anything better. The only comfort left for day-to-day life was the present: living each day as if it were the last and, many times, longing for it actually to be. Finding enjoyment, satisfaction, and pleasure, without thinking much about the future, was the most efficient way to distract myself from the tedium.

Perhaps if I had understood back then that it wasn’t so much about living each day as if it were my last, but about living each day training my character, without agitation, without apathy, and without pretense, it would have shortened the suffering and the depression a little. Clearly, back then I lacked a lot of character to accept and face life as it was, with its challenges and obligations. So I would say: instead of living each day as if it were your last, live each day strengthening your character, without agitation, without apathy, and without pretense.

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You can also read this note in Spanish here.