9000 Days
Reflecting on mortality as of 10/3/2023
Sunday 9/24/2023, was my 9000th day outside the womb. You can see that it is now a week and a half later, so I would take all of the below with a grain of salt.
As a function of a number of events in my life, the past few years have led me to stoic philosophy where I first encountered the concept of Memento Mori, or “remember you must die.” At face value, this seems quite morbid and almost too extreme. Preaching that it is actually beneficial to keep death at the top of mind is unorthodox, I would argue increasingly so in an era where death is pretty far removed from day-to-day life.
As advances in medicine and travels from the farms to the cities have continued to compound over the years, it seems that death itself is almost a thing of the past. I would say that this is a topic for another post - namely the fact that as we have had scientific advances and ways of explaining the natural world without invoking the supernatural we have been able to step away from our mortality in a way that those of past generations simply could not. I also realize that my writing in these posts at times is atrocious from a grammatical perspective, but as you can see, I have already procrastinated a week and a half, so at least it is something.
Embracing the fact that death is inevitable (even typing out this sentence goes against my instincts for I still feel that I will live forever) is quite important to being able to live life to the fullest today. As Marcus Aurelius said, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
There are unfortunate and sudden reminders of our mortality that barge their way into our lives at times, causing us to prioritize and reset our goals. In the moment right now I am reminded of all of the times in sports throughout the years when I was held back from play due to injury, and in those moments I was injured I thought “Man, once I heal this X, I will do [insert exercise] every single day” or rehab this muscle, or prehab this joint, ad infinitum. And inevitably, what happens is that I recover, am gung ho for all of 2 seconds, and then return to the status quo. Like a New Year’s resolution dead by Groundhog’s Day.
In reminding myself of death, I have felt a renewed sense of urgency - clearly not in all things, but hey, I am at least acknowledging it and working to get better. I think especially coming off of a pandemic in which all semblance of normalcy went out the window for a year, and then when I returned to school it was not the real world, but college in which I was already at (or at least towards) the top of the totem pole. In starting my actual job and moving to Puerto Rico, it felt like it was a continuation of fantasy land, not the scary real world we were warned about.
At some point, perhaps while observing my friends who moved to real apartments with real roommates in real cities and looking at them with pity, I realized that I too was living life. It sounds incredibly dumb, but what I do today is what I am doing with my life. It is not on the come. It is today and it is now in this moment. In fact, this could be all that there is as I could drop dead on this keyboard. That would be ironic, huh? But that hypothetical is emblematic of the point I am trying to make. Better to die midway through this post than how I was about 10 minutes ago with it in my drafts dated 10 days ago.
Even though I am still a coward and will not take the requisite risks and leaps that I sometimes do in thought experiments, I think being cognizant of this fact and trying to remind myself as much as I can sanely do has made me take more initiative across several domains in my life.
In relationships, health, work, or spiritual/intellectual practices, there really is no tomorrow. My phone background cheesily has another Marcus quote - “You could be good today and yet you choose tomorrow” - and I often just forget that it is there since it blends into my subconscious, but there have been moments where it lights the flame under my rump just enough to get me from zero to one.
At this point, you still may be asking, “Dave, how did you realize that it was your 9000th day?” and that, dear friend, would be a great question. I heard of a practice from a podcast guest that they had tracked on their phone essentially the days that they had left to live as a countdown. I had this for a while where there was both a count up from my birthday and a countdown from where actuarial tables based on my life factors would say I die. Very presumptuous, plus such a large and distant number that the day-to-day changes were not visceral enough.
I opted to keep the running tally of days lived on my home screen, but changed the days lived to days died. Another benefit of memento mori is the reframing of the past as dead. The days that you live belong to death. If you have a loved one who passes away tomorrow, your memory from a year ago will not change, for it was in the past, and those days belonged to death ever since they occurred. Certainly, your perspective or the significance of the memory will change, and your potential for creating new memories with that person will change, but fundamentally what has happened has happened and you cannot change that.
There is a (I think at least) somewhat funny story of a stoic who, upon learning his son has died, replies “I knew that he was mortal.” Of course, this is rarely thought to be a funny story, more commonly emblematic of stoic stereotypes of emotionlessness. I actually like this story and it has also changed how I think about grieving death. I know that my grandparents will die, my parents will die, and my siblings, and everyone I have ever known or will ever know will die. We are all born with a terminal diagnosis.
The reframing of the life I have lived as the life I have died sounds at first to be a bit dark or depressing, but upon further inspection has actually given me motivation to make the most of each day before I give it away to death. The running total of days died on my phone (like my wallpaper) oftentimes just blends into the background and I do not realize it. However, after a day spent scrolling mindlessly through social media, gorging myself with too much food, and being lazy or unmotivated in various aspects of my life, I can see that another day has ticked away and now belongs to death, and what do I have to show for it?
I have now been on this earth for over 9000 days, and what do I have to show for it? Sure I do not remember a good portion of those days in the early years, or actually, I remember substantially none of them. Sure there are moments of days or arcs of days, but when I add up all the moments that makeup minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, the moments forgotten far outweigh those remembered. It reminds me that I do not want to sit and create more days and moments that I do not remember, or come to a point in another 9000 days and realize that I had not squeezed everything I could out of them.
Why wait for 9000? In 9 days I should have a significant enough amount of data in order to plot how I am moving with respect to my goals, closer, further, or stagnant. Lucky for me, the next 9 days are made up of single days, single hours, single moments. All I have is each moment, and I am not guaranteed the next. In fact, it is selfish to think that tomorrow is a given.
One of these days I will stop living, or rather, stop dying, for it will not be the first time I die, but the last.