I recently reread Ecclesiastes & on the second reading came across what people tend to be trying to get at with that advice. I'll try give it from the Ecclesiastes perspective

Whatever you go out & gather, is ultimately worthless. So if you're in a shit mood & thinking that some day this work will pay off, you'll find that your days are spent in a shit mood & thinking some day this work will pay off. & then you die & everything you did doesn't really matter, & you spent your time in a shit mood. So if instead you find enjoyment in the simple daily toll, that your work today is essentially paying for the food you'll enjoy today, then you'll find your days are spent in a good mood. & then you die & everything you did doesn't really matter, but at least you enjoyed your time while it lasted

So "live it like your last" is a bit hyperbolic, but at least don't justify your suffering on the idea that life gets better

To try make sense of "live it like your last", it might be better said as "go to sleep at peace with your life even if you were to die in the night"

Stoicism appears to have had a great deal of influence on Jewish writing at the time. Have a look at "St. Paul and Stoicism" if you are so inclined. Interesting paper.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/475275

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Edited to correct attribution error.

Not sure if you meany to imply this or not, but Ecclesiastes is not Christian writing, it's Jewish.

Dammit, was a mental lapse. Appreciate the correction!

Thanks for the clarification. I think the description “live like your last” needs to be tweaked.

Perhaps what is more productive is: live your days so that when you think back on them (let’s say at a time horizon of months), you feel satisfied in what you’ve done and how you’ve grown.

“ everything you did doesn't really matter, but at least you enjoyed your time while it lasted”

Problem with this statement is that what matters after someone does really doesn’t matter to that person after only before, also, on a long enough time span nothing will matter after. Does what most people did 3000 years ago matter? 10000? A million? I wouldn’t chase legacies

I don't think people 'chasing legacies' are generally concerned with whether 'most people' are remembered, that's exactly the point isn't it? Standing out?

A better 'problem' to point out might be the timespan over which few legacies that are remembered originate. 'I want to be the Tutankhamen of my time' is all very well, but there's no reason to think there will even be one.

Some people have tamed fire, invented wheel and overcame population bottlenecks. We don't know their names but their legacy is profound.

As a counterpoint, if they hadn’t done it, someone else would very likely have done it. Individual artworks would be a more unique legacy.

Exactly. Inventions, knowledge, and other things are all inevitable--rediscovered and recreated from scratch each time. Art is our only unique contribution/feedback to the universe.

If you subscribe to determinism, all art pieces are also inevitable.

Quite clearly if population bottleneck wasn't dealt with noone else would be left to do it.

Sure, someone else would have overcome it. Could have been just around the corner. You don't know.

> overcame population bottlenecks

Their names were Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch.

Was more thinking about the Toba eruption bottleneck 75k years back, but sure :)

Some long-term investments are not fun, but do pay off.

As someone who put in the effort for many of these things and is now reaping the reward, I am certainly glad my past self got me here.

Sure, a little misfortune could have led me to a drastically different state today.

But as the saying goes:

> God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.

Which is a saying attributed to Epictetus, written during his time, said that way before anything related to this God was even planned. It's his first rule in the Enchiridion (put to writing by disciples).

God was added there, in a very convenient rephrasing, as if to switch the responsibility from oneself (the core of Epictetus' stoicism, what he was talking about), to God.

Great comment. I’ve always hated that comment but your phrasing makes so much sense.

That's a beautiful perspective. Thanks for your comment.

Perhaps you‘ll find Nietzsche‘s „eternal recurrence“ to be a better approach to the same question. Which is basically to ask:

„If I took this minute / this day / this month / this year of my life... and somebody were to tell me that I had to live it over and over again, ad infinitum, with everything exactly as it was, and nothing changed at all... would I be screaming Hell Yes, or would I be screaming Hell No?“

To me, it‘s an appeal not to recklessness or consumption of short-term pleasures, but to living in integrity with oneself. Not to take shortcuts which you think you‘ll somehow be able to compartmentalizations out of your life. And I think he meant it also to be applied in retrospect: Whatver you did, and whatever happened in your life... can you „own“ it, with all its apparent flaws, and pains and errors? Are you able to see yourself, and see your own life, beyond the categories of of good and bad? Can you, like a good author, take the good, the bad and the ugly from your past and create something of truth and beauty from it?

> If I took this minute / this day / this month / this year of my life... and somebody were to tell me that I had to live it over and over again, ad infinitum, with everything exactly as it was, and nothing changed at all... would I be screaming Hell Yes, or would I be screaming Hell No?

If that argument were actually valid, it would be a fully general refutation of any possible use of your time whatsoever. There's a reason the narrative trope of "trapped in a time loop" contains the word "trapped".

1) You’ll die anyway. So what does “make use of your time” even mean?

2) There’s an augment to made that anything you do or think is predetermined anyway, by past, biology and circumstances. Or, if you prefer, that it’s all based on a fundamental randomness. Either way, that you are more a symptom of the universe than an independent agent. In that sense, Nietzsche’s thought experiment might actually be closer to reality than we think.

3) How can you possibly know that your life right now is not actually just such a recurrence? The fact that you don’t know that it is one would be, of course, part of the script. (Knowing that it is a recurrence would be changing something. And that nothing will be changed is part of the premise.)

As with most things in life, I think finding a balance between the two is most enjoyable. If you only focus on the long term and plan, unless you have a continuous set of long term plans set to culminate and actually do, you'll have gaps in your living experience. You'll always be saving and investing for that one golden day that you may never see for some reason or another.

Meanwhile as you point out, if you focus on living in the moment only, you'll live on cheap small rewards in life.

I think a lot of good long term strategy with allotments for little impulse to pepper life is the best mix, at least for me, so that's how I live. Every now and then I'll splurge and do something unplanned a little extravagant but that's because I already budgeted for that sort of stuff -- my little fun pocket change time and money. Meanwhile I have nice set long term goals that improve my overall life experience as I get older. Some may never happen and that's fine because I'm not living my life wailing for that special time.

Nothing to understand. It's poorly worded at best.

How do you feel about "You should organize each day to be the best possible prototype for all following days?"

That would imply that all following days have the same requirements, which is not the case at all, neither in the short term nor in the long term.

It does not. "each day" means you reapply the mantra every day to the then current state of your life. "for all following days" is the mechanism which forces you to most broadly consider the future and not just one day (as is the issue with "live every day as if it was your last")

Then I will argue that it doesn’t constitute a prototype, and it remains very unclear what criteria to apply for the day.

> I never understood this.

You're definitely understanding it correctly. It's atrociously dangerous advice for any manner of long-term well-being. Humans can reasonably live to 80-100 years of age. Trying to live even 18,000 days as your last is psychotic and impossible, it's both not worth attempting that and harmful to attempt it. Being healthy requires thinking and acting longer term; building savings over a lifetime requires long-term thinking; raising children successfully requires long-term thinking.

Try raising children one day to the next with the guiding parental premise being: this is our last day on earth, what shall we do? It's a recipe for disaster to try to live in short-term thinking day to day.

One of our greatest attributes is the capacity to think, plan and act for the long-term, as many of the things we want require such. Notice I didn't say everyone thinks long-term consistently; notice I didn't pretend all of our institutions think long-term all the time; both are standard issue sarcastic criticisms against long-term thinking, neither of which invalidate the value of long-term thinking.

The correct answer is that some things benefit from (and or require) short-term thinking (particularly immediate focus), some things benefit from (and or require) medium-term thinking, some things benefit from (and or require) long-term thinking. Where thinking implies the comprehensive (thinking, planning, acting, etc).

Whenever I hear/read that phrase, I always picture myself lying in a hospice bed, hooked up to all sorts of medical equipment.

<nit> The philosophy behind hospice is that you are *not* hooked up to all sorts of medical equipment. Rather, you only receive the minimal treatment needed to make yourself comfortable as you let your illness run its course. </nit>

Fair point. I knew that, but my previous comment was poorly articulated in that regard. I meant something along the lines of: hooked up to an opioid infusion.

This needs to be a post in r/comics

> I never understood this

Me neither. I think there are two distinct possibilities you should consider when you think what to do today. First one is that you may die today. Second is that you may not die today.

so the conclusion is that I should get life insurance and try all the drugs I always wanted to?

If you have 'always wanted to' try a bunch of drugs.. yes probably you should (according to that advice).

The thing to realise is that many people don't have any desire to try (the things that we call) drugs, so your comment isn't exposing some flaw in the advice.

If an oracle told me it actually is my last day, I'm not suddenly going to smoke some weed, snort some cocaine, and shoot up some heroin. I wouldn't want to any more than knowing (or assuming, as I do) that I'll live until (at least!) tomorrow.

You really are sure you wouldn't do anything different if an oracle told you it is actually your last day? There are so may possibilities for making the most of it.

You could take out every bit of loan or debt accessible and transfer all the money to charity. You could burn down the HQ of an oil company.

If you live in a country without the rule of Law, like Russia, where known killers and criminals hold positions of power, you could try your hand at assasinating one of them.

I said I wouldn't do drugs, not that I wouldn't do anything differently.

It is meant as a guide and criterion for finding what matters the most in one's life and one's existence and organize their way of life around that. If it was your last day (and you were a philosopher) you would only concern yourself with the most fundamental and essential aspects of existence and questions of life. It is a reference to the Socratic question and quest: "what is the best course in life". He is instructing people to organize the totality of their lives, in answering and as answer to this question. Even if you do long term planning (and he is not saying you shouldn't) he is telling you to focus and concern that worthy life plan of yours, in answering and as answer to that question.

Implicitly, he is also saying that what drives people to waste their time and concern themselves with petty issues, unimportant to their fundamental existence and be drowned in "everydayness", is the ever-lurking-in-the-background assumption that "I have got plenty of time".

I see it as, don't postpone the things you really want to do until some later day, that day may never come. Start on them now.

Aka don’t wait for the right time, because the time is almost never perfectly right.

It’s a dumb statement. Better advice is to live a life worth reliving exactly the same way an infinite amount of times.

Ok, echoing my top level comment... An alternative framing that I've come to find more helpful is to take your life expectancy, and cut it by 2/3. For example, if you're 20 years old and your life expectancy is 80 (ie. 60 more years), pretend that you only have 20 more, so you'll only live until you're 40. It's nice cause it naturally adjusts as you get older. You'll have smaller windows to work with.

This approach strikes a nice balance. It gives you enough time to be able to really do something and change directions if you want. But not so much time that you can really waste any. It forces you to ask the hard questions about whether your day to day is truly connecting with your dreams, and whether you're on a path to get there.

Of course, Seneca didn't have life expectancy tables to work with. But I think he would have approved. :)

I often see the opposite in practice: young people living as if they were going to die tomorrow and old people living as if they were going to live forever.

I think what it means is that you shouldn't procrastinate anything or think that you can make up for things later. There may be no later, so just do your best here and now. That of course includes resting when needed, so it doesn't mean always be doing something.

I imagine my last day is going to be spent hooked up to a life support machine in a climate controlled environment as various close people trickle in to say farewell.

I’d prefer to spend the close of my 20s doing something else like raving on a warm beach with a bunch of people who don’t know me and won’t miss me tomorrow, and hopefully finding one or two fellow travellers who I can keep in touch with until my dying days :)

exploration vs exploitation

The real kicker of course, is for many people there is even more than a few folks coming to visit, especially for folks who don’t do the hard and nasty stuff in like when it’s necessary for others.

Same. If today is my last day, I am sure as hell not going to work (even though I love my career). I am driving to have a huge party and spend every minute with my family.

My conclusion has been to not take the time scale literally. I find it useful to act as though I only have 3 years left. That’s a good timescale to have life operate properly, but also realize you need to make hard choices sooner rather than later.

"Today is the first day of the rest of your life" much more inspiring

Either you are dying. Or you know you will be killed, so why not waste all the money and other property you have when you still have a chance... Seems like not really advise you should follow exactly.

exactly. If I live till old age, I fully intend on living out my last days as a drug addict rather than some futile, painful attempts at curing a terminal illness

A famous saying in my culture goes, work for a better life as if you live forever; work for a better end as if you die tomorrow.

> You should organize each day as if it were your last

We all do. Even if we choose to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.