Day 11 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Memento mori sounds like drama.
To the Stoics it means something precise.
The phrase is Latin for “remember you will die.”
It names something most people spend enormous energy avoiding.
The Stoics thought that avoidance cost people the quality of the lives they were busy avoiding death in.
Marcus Aurelius returned to death constantly in the Meditations.
Keeping death visible changed how he saw everything else.
The meetings that felt urgent became less urgent.
The slights that felt important became harder to locate.
The people he loved became more precious.
The work that was genuinely his to do became clearer.
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
Seneca wrote an entire essay on this, On the Shortness of Life, and it’s one of the most useful pieces of writing I have read.
Life is long enough, he argued, if you use it.
Most people defer what matters,
spend their hours on what doesn’t,
assume there’s always more time coming,
and arrive at old age to discover there wasn’t.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.”
~ Seneca
Invested is the key word, and Seneca means something beyond modern, anxious productivity.
Whether the hours of your life go toward what you actually value, or get handed over to distraction, to other people’s demands, to the low-grade busyness that feels like activity and isn’t.
For vegans, memento mori does something specific, worth naming.
One of the most common experiences in vegan life is an encounter with mortality that most people are structured to avoid.
You know, in a way most people around you don’t, what it means for a life to end so someone else can have a particular experience.
You’ve already confronted, in some form, the fact that death is specific: it happens to individuals, and it matters to them.
The vegan position is essentially that these deaths matter, they are not invisible, and they belong in the calculation.
That confrontation, uncomfortable as it is, is also a form of practice.
The person who has genuinely reckoned with animal mortality often finds it easier to reckon with their own.
Death becomes real rather than welcome, and something real can be worked with in a way something abstract cannot.
Memento mori, done properly, clarifies.
It strips away what only seems important and brings into focus what actually is.
Marcus used it as a daily reset.
When something felt overwhelming or trivial, he’d ask: will this matter in a hundred years?
Will this matter in ten?
Usually the answer was no, and he’d redirect his energy toward what the answer was yes for.
The practice extends naturally to how vegans think about time and urgency.
The animal welfare movement has a time horizon longer than one person’s life.
The changes most worth working toward won’t arrive in our lifetimes.
Memento mori, held rightly, turns that fact clarifying rather than discouraging.
Your job is to do your part of the work well, in the time you have, then hand it on.
“Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing.”
~ Seneca
Not the trivial things.
Everything.
Practice for today
Read Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, the full essay is about forty minutes.
It’s available free online.
Then write: what are you postponing that you wouldn’t postpone if you knew time was genuinely short?
Be specific.
The vague answer is the avoidance answer.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.