Carpe Diem, YOLO and the Shackles of Now

Sometime in my 20s I wrote a middling poem that ended with these two stanzas.

All we have left are moments

That we catalog as moments

Before the moment’s over.

Yesterday, they’ve decided,

Is Judgement Day and we are

Hungover, lonely and late.

While I still find the pessimism deliciously human, what strikes me now is its unequivocal dismissal of the present moment. Indeed, I was fatigued by pop culture’s obsession with carpe diem—you know, the whole waking triumphantly to meet the day, skipping even more triumphantly like a movie starlet through a field of wildflowers and squeezing the triumphant triumph out of every second like an intrepid milkmaid.

It’s not that I didn’t agree with the sentiment. As a teenager, I was desperate for every moment, constantly chasing the sunrise as it flashed like a broken alarm clock across the Berkshires. I scratched, crawled and staggered to witness every spectacle no matter how tiny and savor each moment like it might be my last. And that philosophy served me pretty well…until it didn’t.

As I got older, I found it patronizing. Carpe diem was for the blissfully ignorant. The rest of us were terrified, and besides, we needed to get up for work. If I was equipped to seize the day, I wouldn’t be scribbling poems in a legal pad in between bottles of rotgut wine.

The March of the Gurus

And if that wasn’t enough, the self-help brigade jumped on the bandwagon and started hurling cheap paperbacks at all of us broken folk—their common schtick went a little something like this:

Hey ugly, are you depressed?

Seize the day and you’ll hurt less.

While not exactly snake oil, the prevailing mantras highlighted a path where ardent believers could harness the power of now. Most of these methods forfeited empathy and force fed us motivation. It seemed that half of the population wasn’t trying hard enough, and if we couldn’t lasso the moment and break the damn thing like a bronco, maybe we weren’t human enough to thrive in the first place.

The basic roadmap tended to go like this—once we acknowledge that the past cannot be changed, we must focus our energy on building a future, by piling a bunch of “now” moments on top of each other. Sounds easy, right? What about for a human who traffics in nostalgia and specializes in panic attacks?

When I look back at my poems that tend to satirize these notions, I see a comprehensive estrangement. As a person struggling with depression and anxiety, I had no use for fluffy aphorisms—they seemed so removed from my version of reality that I felt the urgent need to clap back. Ironically enough, that anti-carpe diem stance, gave me purpose and in a weird, unsustainable way, a temporary path to the power of now.

Operation Mess Around and Find Out

Once that path went dark, I realized my nihilistic bent needed a rebrand. Did this mean I had to throw away my punk rock spikes, burn all my rare vinyl, subscribe to the Economist and immediately find a meadow to frolic through? Not really. But, I did need to look around, consider where my joy actually resides, discover gratitude and start the hard work of believing in the universe. Despite my zealous refusal to conform, I shared a lot of endearing traits with the rest of the optimistic world. I loved helping humans. I had many friends I could rely on without reservation. Gratitude was not hard to find and curl up beside.

This head start notwithstanding, I needed something more visceral to make me believe in the world. And yep, you guessed it, this is when the mushrooms, officially join the party, ( Full disclosure—they’d joined many parties in my early years and offered up glimpses of an alternative conception of the self in context with the universe) but this time it was different. I was trying to live, and my anxiety wouldn’t let me do that.

A Surprise Cameo for Faith

If I tried to YOLO twenty years ago, like really authentically tried to inhabit my best self and strut boldly into each passing moment, I would have slipped like a clown on a banana peel. And this may seem a fricking wild sentence to type but it’s because I didn’t have faith. I hadn’t reconciled the beguiling mystery of our existence, and I’d rather joke about death than navigate a world where the people I love blip off the planet Though I wasn’t antagonistic, I was a devout atheist.

Mushroom trips provided that necessary spiritual structure. Suddenly, I knew I was part of a larger narrative. Keep in mind, I’m still a skeptic at heart and can’t really subscribe to any real theory of creation or eternity. But that’s fine with me because I’ve got the big meaningful chunk. I am an indispensable part of the universe and what we do matters. We are—living or dead—vital to the universe and contribute to the fabric of the cosmos.

Who would have thought faith was the secret ingredient? And just like the mushroom trips alone aren’t enough, faith in of itself, was not the only antidote. But it did provide a platform to explore my pain; yep, there I was on the edge of the diving board and faith had the common courtesy to sneak up behind me and send me bellyflopping into the great outground pool of existence. Hell, with faith riding shotgun, I could even pick up one of those inane self-help paperbacks, and some of the lessons actually resonate.

And keep in mind, when I ramble about faith, I’m not excluding or discounting any popular religion—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and any other prevailing ism can deliver this solace just as effectively as whatever meaning I’ve elected to endorse. Likewise, faith can be found in art, music, and family too. The kicker is that, whatever shape it takes, one has to take it as gospel.

Faith and Fear are Strange Bedfellows

With faith established, I could interrogate the fear that propelled my anxiety. I would soon realize—with the help of a mushroom trips where I revisited some visceral pain of my childhood—that my anxiety and depression seemed to derive from a fear of being alone and a prevailing fear of death. With faith in my corner, I could recognize this terror and peek behind the curtain. What was on the other side? Oh, just a glistening pigpile of gratitude, possibility and joy. Indeed, I could muzzle my panic and skip through that golden meadow like all those YOLO kids from the days of yore.

And I’m not saying this is my new personality—I’d like to think I’m still sarcastic, dismissive and a little too honest for a sliver of the population. But I do believe in the universe and our capacity to nourish each other.

I’ll conclude with this couplet from a Mary Oliver poem I used to hate.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

I absolutely love it now. And yeah, the poets were right all along. And so were the gurus. When I refuse to entertain behaviors that feed my anxiety and recognize them as feelings from the past that actively prohibit any kind of future, I wind up in the uncharted territory of now. And when I dwell in those moments, I feel ruthlessly loved and oh-so alive.

#YOLO