The Friday Roundup - 4/11/2024 Edition
Each Day is a Separate Life; A New Way To Multiply Big Numbers; The Creativity of ADHD; Open-Minded People Literally See the World Differently
Every Friday, I share some of the most interesting articles, videos, and books I’m looking at with our paid subscribers. It’s an eclectic mix fueled by my unique personal variant of ADHD and pattern recognition, so you won’t find compilations like these anywhere else.
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Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to another edition of the TSRFR!
Here’s a rundown of some things I found interesting this week. You may notice some of these articles are older - I was spelunking through Pocket’s “Discover” section and immediately found some gems, but they appear to be reprints of articles published several years ago. Nevertheless, worth your time!
Each Day is a Separate Life — Vitaliy Katsenelson/The Intellectual Investor
“Live every day as though it’s your last.”
It’s such an overused phrase, it’s become cliché. Platitudinous, even. Anyone who has thought about it for even a second knows that it doesn’t make sense.
If I knew today was my last day on earth, I wouldn’t be writing this.
If you knew it was your last day, you wouldn’t be reading it.
We’d each be packing as much love and experience and memory-making into the day as we possibly could, holding our spouses and our children, saying our goodbyes to friends, maybe finding a mountain top to go with them and watch one last sunset.
But to live this way every day is impossible. I’m happy to be here writing this and not trying to scratch off a bucket list at the buzzer. I hope you’re happy to be reading it. It’s not a waste of time, it’s just not what we’d be doing if we had very little time left. We would prioritize the things that matter most.
This matters. It just matters less.
And that’s perfectly acceptable.
The truth is, not not knowing when our time will come is one of life’s greatest gifts. I would hate to know when and how I was going to die. I’d spend my life in anticipation of that event. I would obsess over it. Every day would feel like a ticking clock, counting down the seconds to inevitability.
Not knowing the hour of our death gives us freedom to live, to love, to take in beauty, to make things, and yes, even to waste time in a number of enjoyable pursuits.
Enter Vitaliy Katsenelson, with a somewhat different way of looking at all of this than we usually hear:
We are horrible with our time. Our initial reaction is to blame it on Netflix and Facebook. I get it – but at the same time, I don’t.
Seneca lived almost 2,000 years ago. Then, pictures of friends were carved in stone, not posted to Instagram. History was written in real time in the Roman Colosseum so it could later be dramatized on Netflix. But even then, according to Seneca’s first letter in the book Moral Letters, “The largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.”
Even then, Seneca was really upset about how people wasted their time: “What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands.”
His advice: “Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.”
Think about this when you waste your next hour on cat videos on Facebook: “Nothing is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who can will oust us from possession.”
Fair enough. We all easily let too much time slip by without making great purpose of it. I feel this very acutely as I look at how fast my children have grown while I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to figure out who I am so I can be better, especially for them.
Katseneleson continues:
Seneca struggled with managing his time, too, and he admits it: “I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss…”
And this is the part I really want my kids to read. Seneca writes:
“I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early.”
After reading Seneca, it is impossible not to want to retake control of the most important, irreplaceable gift you are given as a birthright – time. But how do you do this? I borrowed my practical solution from Seneca: “Begin at once to live and count each separate day as a separate life.”
“Each separate day as a separate life.” What a brilliant idea. A life bookended by sunrise and sunset. A day is a perfect, meaningful measuring unit. I can look at each day and evaluate how I spent it. If I achieve mostly perfect days, then they’ll spill into a perfect life.
I really like this idea. It seems like a small semantic shift to go from “live every day as though it’s your last” to “live each day as its own separate lifetime,” but the more you think about it, the more significant you can see that it is.
More from Katseneleson:
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