I’ve been staring at a skull for the past month in the hope it positively transforms my life. Not constantly staring at it, I hasten to add. But I’ve placed the plaster-cast cranium that normally gets taken out of storage once a year at Halloween in a prominent spot on my desk so I can see those dark eye-sockets facing me in daily judgment.
This is my attempted cure for procrastination.
Such use of a memento mori – a reminder of one’s inevitable death – has been advocated by various philosophers and theologians over the ages. Having a sharp appreciation of your mortality injects your life with the urgency and commitment it deserves. So said an array of thinkers from Socrates to Steve Jobs.
British academic Simon May explores the topic further in Jump! A New Philosophy for Conquering Procrastination. The book explores a common frustration in a world blending near-limitless choice with a cult of productivity and a sense of powerlessness over global injustices. “We’re not lazy,” he writes. Rather “we avoid what we most value”. Typically, we manage competing priorities by doing “tasks that make us feel like we’re administering life rather than living it”.
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May follows similar territory to Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks (an approximation of your lifespan if you live to be 80) and a follow-up book Meditations for Mortals. Both authors have lots of practical advice – including to wean yourself off smartphone dopamine-hits and to stop worrying about other people’s opinions of you – but the one exercise that I thought I’d really lean into is thinking about death. Not just thinking about it but, as May recommends, “attaining a deep awareness of death’s possibility at any moment”.
I’ve always felt pretty blessed in life – my best friend growing up called me “Jammy Joe”. And I’ve sometimes wondered, quite self-indulgently, that had I experienced some awful blow, or near-death experience, could I have been spurred to write the great Irish novel (not that I ever got beyond a short story written in my 20s)? But is it possible to put transformative pep in my step by simply imagining death as opposed to experiencing a real life trauma?
There’s a classic episode of The Simpsons which acts as a thought experiment on this point. Homer is given 24 hours to live after eating a poisonous fish in a Japanese restaurant. As the end approaches, he tries to achieve various things he has been putting off, like patching things up with his father and passing on some life-hacks to his son Bart.
The kicker is the final scene. Homer wakes up the following morning – it turns out the poison didn’t kill him. “From this day forward I vow to live life to its fullest,” he declares. It cuts to him sitting alone on the couch watching sports on TV and eating snacks. The viewer is left to ask, what would you do if you got a second chance at life? Would you also return to the sofa?
The author Róisín Lanigan described in a recent Irish Times interview how her life “massively changed” when he got a cancer diagnosis in 2018 when she was just 26. “It’s probably why I work so fast now,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I have to do things, I have to do things.’”
Lanigan described how she got tattoos on her hands reading “I love you / I’m glad I exist” as a present to herself for being five years with clear scans. And, in a way, a tattoo can act as a memento. “Carpe Diem” is a popular phrase used in skin art, although I always thought if I got inked myself I’d go for Jill Abrahamson’s variation of the theme. The first woman executive editor of the New York Times has a tattoo on her right shoulder showing an old subway token with its slogan “Good for one fare only”. (Sadly, the Leap card equivalent “Don’t forget to tap on” doesn’t have the same ring to it.)
But what of the staring-at-skull experiment? Did it work?
It hasn’t been transformative but the act of placing the memento mori in my line of sight – and occasionally even talking to it like “poor Yorick” in Hamlet – feels like it has moved the mental dial somehow. It has been a practical lesson in something the Ancient Greeks were aware of – the idea, as Burkeman puts it, that “we don’t think ourselves into new ways of acting; we act our way into new ways of thinking”.
The lesson is: don’t wait for some persuasive argument to make you start doing the thing that you really know you should be doing. Instead, do something – take a small step – to help change your thought processes.
Staring into that skeletal reflection every day, and having it silently question me on what I’m doing with my precious time, is a small step. It hasn’t made me more productive. But that was never the point – the aim, says May, is to inspire “calm attentiveness rather than panicked haste”. To that extent, the trial has fleetingly succeeded. In moments of clarity, I say to myself: why am I getting so anxious about not achieving everything I want to achieve? I’m alive.
So I’ll give it another month. Then there’s always the option of a tattoo.
