"most useless observation ever made by an ancient Greek philosopher"

If he only realized that he ends with a uniquely Epicurean observation:

"[Y]ou should [not] try to meditate yourself into a mystical state of total presence or concentration, but just that to recognise the fact that the past is past, and that soon you won’t have any future left – so you really might as well be here. It’s not so bad. Often enough, it’s wonderful. And in any case, there’s nowhere else to be."

"Death is nothing to us" is not just a temporal categorization of "before" versus "after", but, more important, it is a proposition that we are mortal, that life is finite, that time is precious, and pleasure is prudent.

Besides, Aristotle suggesting that men have more teeth than women is really the most useless pseudo-observation.

Thanks Don for sharing the article, simple as it is.

I think his negative opening comment on Epicurus was because he might think that the fear of death will help motivate someone to enjoy the present moment.

I think everyone is at their own level of dealing with time and the idea of death, depending on how much they have contemplated their own mortality. Unlike the author of the article, I personally think that no matter how old one is, that some amount of planning is a good thing. But of course if one is retired, then one will plan different types of activities compared to if one is still employed. Also, it does take some planning in order to organize social events, so hopefully we all keep that up until the day we die. I think some amount of planning also can help make life more enjoyable, but also not being too attached to any one specific outcome (being able to go with the flow as things unfold).

This was a fun quote, as I myself do tend to live in the future:

Quote

 

The result is what’s been called the “when-I-finally” mindset: the sense that real fulfilment, or even real life itself, hasn’t quite arrived yet, so that present experience is merely something to get through, en route to something better. The person stuck in such a mindset, wrote John Maynard Keynes, “does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward for ever to the end of cat-dom”.

Quote from Don

Living in the moment

This made me think of my own experiences. I was once ambitious and highly stressed, till I had a series of panic attacks. For those who never had a serious panic attack, it feels like a heart attack with similar symptoms, but it is quite innocent, although you have the impression of dying. First pills etc and then psychologist. It became soon clear that I projected my whole life on the future, I postponed happiness to the future, and at the same time I feared the uncertain future. So the ideal cocktail for anxiety, high blood pressure and panic attacks. The therapy consisted among other things in graphically imagine a time line and situating your thoughts on that time line, when in the future, you move the lamp (¿cursor?) to now. After a month moving my thoughts to now, and thinking at the moment everything is OK, my level of anxiety became lower than ever. This was for me a kind of wisdom experience.