Why Carpe Diem

Brian YS Wong January 09, 2025 22:21

“Carpe Diem” – we are told.

To seize the day, is a moral prerogative. We must expend each and every hour, minute, and second with due care and caution, paying conscientious heed to the fact that our time on Earth is finite. And thus, we must account for how we are living our lives, lest we be dragged into the recurrent motion of the routine and the mundane.

Much of this makes sense – in an abstract vacuum.

Yet I am here to advocate a slightly contrarian view. In seizing the ‘Day’, we are failing to live up to our fullest potential. There is something almost innately self-defeating about fixating over the ‘Days’, to the expense of the ‘Months’, ‘Years’, and ‘Time Undefined’ portions of our projects and pursuits.
I must of course preface this argument by flagging that there are best practices to work that should and must be maintained – we should not dilly dally for the sake of frivolity; we should not undertake ceaselessly asinine tasks for the sake of pleasing others (though we may find ourselves drawn to doing so as a means to an end); we should be forthright in the way we grasp and hold onto opportunities, and live stridently and candidly in the light.

But the novel point is as follows: in fixating over maximising the (apparent) utility of each and every moment we are living, we are thereby handicapping our potential achievements.

The first part to this argument is the observation that we – as subjective agents shaped by dispositions, biases, and historical tendencies – are deeply imperfect judges of what amounts to ‘utility’. Short-term utilities are difficult to gauge as is, though we can try through conferring and deliberating with others around us. Yet medium- to long-term utilities are much harder to appraise, simply on the grounds that we are naturally driven, per System 1 thinking (cf. Kahneman), to prioritise the immediately visceral and tangible. We loathe thinking in a multitude of steps, or logical pathways, for doing so would require us to acknowledge the existence of multiple critical junctures, and to accommodate the uncertainty that inheres within such pathway maps. This is why the aspiring solicitor would often view the number of cases addressed, processed, and ‘closed’ within a week as an internal key performance indicator; such rudimentary quantification is echoed and reflected in the actions of mid-ranking bureaucrats, who would construe ‘the number of papers pushed and reports filed’ as a key measurement of their career productivity.

The point isn’t so much that such quantification is impossible, but that it is innately vacuous. In conflating what is quantifiable with productivity, and productivity (loosely defined) with utility and success, our ‘Seizing the Day’ proclivity takes us away from thinking ahead, and planning in terms of months or years, and instead traps us in this ceaseless cycle and rhythm of short-termist, myopic thinking. I would much rather someone opted against ‘Carpe Diem’, and took seriously the alternative mantra of ‘Embracing the Year’, as a rationale for strategising and thinking in a more long-termist manner.

Again, I am by no means questioning the intentions and original sentiments underpinning ‘Carpe Diem’. Instead, I am interested in the manifestation and weaponisation of the rhetoric in practice. Indeed, the sense of urgency and existential angst fueling contemporary interpretations and invoking of ‘Carpe Diem’ could well lead us down the completely wrong paths. It is the “40 Under 40” or “Top 30 Entrepreneurs” rankings that in turn trigger the primordial yearning in us to make a mark, to leave a legacy as soon as possible, that compels individuals to reach for short-cuts – to neglect the foundations that must be laid, the steps that must be paved, in order for eventual success to materialise.

Here's a more concrete illustration of the point: venture capital-backed start-up culture is anchored, at its core, in this incessant fixation over “Seize the Day”. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to pull out all their stops – marketing, haranguing, disguise, camouflage, ‘alternative facts’ – in order to prop up their enterprises’ valuations and appeal to prospective investors. Adam Neumann, Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and even the more obscure and lesser-known, Charlie Javice, are all examples of individuals who have adopted the mantra of ‘Carpe Diem’ (at any cost) and construed it as a carte blanche for the acts of impunity they perpetrated.

Now, as the reader, you could very well object – surely, it is the unscrupulous dearth of integrity and ethics that contributed towards these individuals’ spectacular career combustions? Surely, it would be remiss to attribute their transgressions to “Carpe Diem”, even if certain cultural norms and narratives are at work here?

The response is as follows – whilst there is nothing inherently wrong about “Seizing the Day” as a concept… as it is applied and transmitted in public, fed by one generation of entrepreneurs to another, the adage has mutated into a beast, into a fierce and conniving terror that has the ability of corrupting hearts and minds, and turning otherwise decent characters into ambitious, hollowed-out shells of their former selves.

This is why we must exercise extraordinary caution with those who tell us, “Carpe Diem, do X.” Even whilst the former part of the sentence is certainly good advice (think ‘Dead Poets Society’ – though one may argue that ‘tis slightly controversial, too), the latter usually isn’t.

Brian YS Wong

Assistant Professor, HKU