No Sense Friday: "Live Each Day Like Your Last"

Actually, Gandhi said a little more than "Live it up!"

Gandhi supposedly once said:

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Too bad we often drop the second half. “Live each day like it’s your last, hell yeah!” What a great excuse to party instead of study.

But there’s more than one way to be aware that “you might die tomorrow,” and I doubt the “go out with a bang” kind is the one Gandhi actually meant. Perhaps he was referring to a soldier knowing she might fall in battle the next day rather than a corrupt government official throwing one last party before he gets fired.

When he was 17, Steve Jobs came across another version of Gandhi’s quote:

“If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.”

It impressed him, and from then on, he looked into the mirror every day to check in with himself about the big picture he was pursuing. “If this is the last feature, the last product, the last idea I get to ship, will it have been worth putting out into the world?”

That’s the kind of reflection on our mortality we need in a world where most of us aren’t constantly stressing about survival. Not, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

When we remember the second half of Gandhi’s lesson, we can work with tomorrow without taking for granted. We can ignore immediate gratification yet still do what’s good both for others and for us in the long run.

Don’t live each day like your last. Live it mindfully, but live it working towards a tomorrow that can be even better — because despite what Gandhi said, most of the time, tomorrow will be another day.

-Nik

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About No Sense Friday: Most people live for Friday. Relaxing on the weekend is fine, but we can’t just waste it away every time. That’s why Friday is the most important day to call out things that make no sense. Because in a way, the concept of ‘Friday’ itself makes no sense.

A good life is lived every day, not just once a week.