Day 136: Memento Mori for Normal People | Dying Every Day

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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 136.

You don’t need a skull on your desk or a Latin motto in your bio to practice memento mori.

Montaigne, a sixteenth-century philosopher influenced by the Stoics, treats mortality as a human issue rather than a rare or dramatic event. He removes death from the category of “special occasions” and places it where it truly belongs: within everyday life.

Montaigne famously relies on the old saying that “to philosophize is to learn to die.” But his goal isn’t to make you morbid—it’s to make you less influenced by fear. He argues (again and again) that much of what we call “living” is really just avoidance: constant busyness, constant delay, constant mental bargaining. We postpone the hard conversation. We postpone the creative work. We postpone courage. We postpone rest. We even postpone joy.

Remembering death is a way of interrupting the postponement. [...]

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