Memento Mori

1st of December, 2021 - Leuven

I’m sitting on my bed in my student dorm, looking outside the window. I feel emotional and full of questions. It is 5 pm and already dark outside, typical for the first of December.

I just heard from my mom that my Vake, my grandfather, died.

While I’m sitting there on my bed, my thoughts wander to his life.

“Was he happy with the life he had lived?”

I want to know. I need to know. But it is impossible to ask him anymore.

…

After some silence, another question surfaces.

“Will I be happy with the life I lived?”

—

We are all going to die one day. Hopefully, not soon, of course! But it is something we often don’t want to acknowledge or talk about.

But what if we reminded ourselves of it every single day?

Memento Mori is a Latin expression that means (loosely translated): “Remember (that you have) to die”. It might sound a bit dark, but for me, reminding myself of this daily is a major driving force in my life. I have never had a near-death experience, but there are countless examples of people who have. Sometimes, it changes their life for the better. It made them realise how our time here on Earth is precious and we have to take care of it.

I recently made a big personal decision.

The sourdough bakery “De Broodenier” in Leuven has been where I spent most of my time during the last year. I like working there (fun colleagues, free bread with hummus and no worries to take home), but the problem was that I felt like I didn’t have enough time for my own projects.

It is comfortable here, but I know it is not my dream…

Because of these doubts, I wondered if I should continue or dial down to part-time.

If I were to choose to work part-time, I would still be able to pay all my basic expenses. I’ll just earn less. The question to me boiled down to:

What’s worth more to me:

8-10 days extra per month?

Or a few hundred euros?

I soon realised that if I didn’t change anything, I would lose those extra days per month and I would never be able to get them back. The money, on the other hand, would be possible to regain later on during the pursuit of my real dream. Difficult, but possible.

So, since the first of April, I dialled my schedule down to working part-time in the bakery, resulting in two extra free days a week to spend the way I want.

Two full days…

a week!

That’s a lot of time, and I feel a big responsibility to make the best use of that time.

Even though I have had my fair share of “free time” during my studies and afterwards, I still don’t know exactly how to make the most out of it. So, this time I set out to find ways to not just procrastinate, but to make real progress and (maybe even more importantly) feel energised at the same time!

That brings me to one of the strategies I use now:

“Reminding myself daily that one day I will die…”

Because I knew that I would spend a vast amount of time at my creative desk (yes, I have two desks, the other one is the computer desk) I arranged it in such a way that I would set myself up for success.

Here are the three things I did to motivate myself:

From the moment we are born, we have 3640 weeks until we turn 70 years old*. For some of you, that might sound like a lot, for others it might seem like it can flash by in the blink of an eye (I’ll count myself in the second camp).

How many of those weeks have I already lived and how many do I still have left to live?

For me, the answer is: 1353 weeks lived & 2287 weeks left.

(see thingie nr. 2 for the tool I used to calculate this)

However, in a way, these numbers are just… numbers. What if we could visualise this?

That’s exactly what the “Memento Mori week calendar” does! (see the picture above)

Every square is a week. Every line is a year.

Now every week on Thursday, I cross off the next little square.

*FYI: I chose 70 years old for multiple reasons. First of all, it’s close to the global average lifespan of a man (+-71 years). Secondly, I guess that will be the retirement age by the time I’m that old (in Belgium, they recently increased it from 65 to 67). So let’s just hope I’ll make it to seventy. In the meantime, I’ll live as if I’ll never really retire and see all the years after 70 as extra.

Below the Memento Mori week calendar, there hangs this small but profound paper:

It tells me how many days I’ve already lived (9442 days at the moment of writing) and how many days I still have until I’m 70 (16125 days at the moment of writing)

The reason why I have it as well is that it serves as a daily reminder that time moves on.

So every single day during my morning routine, I take an eraser and a pencil, add one day to the days lived and subtract one day from the days left.

—

However, all this, the weekly calendar and the daily paper, is still not the full picture. To show you everything, I still have to introduce someone.

I’ll let you in on a little secret.

Some weeks ago, armed with a camera in my hand and my most important existential questions, I stepped into a time travel machine towards the future.

Destination: The year 2100.

Goal: Find my wisest mentor: the 100-year-old version of myself.

After dodging flying cars and shaking hands with robots, I eventually found old me lying in bed. I was so happy that he was still alive! (I didn’t die at 70 after all). Moreover, he had this red book in his hand containing the stories of my life. He answered my questions with surprising clarity, and he even let me take this picture of him:

Just kidding. The truth is that, in the absence of a time travel machine, I asked AI to generate a picture of how I would look at 100-years old. What do you think? Pretty handsome guy, right? I would be very happy if I looked like that at 100 years old!

The idea of having a visual representation of the 100-year-old version of yourself comes from Matthew Dicks. His book “Someday is Today” has inspired me to print out this 100-year-old me and put it in different spots where I pass by daily, one of them being my creative desk.

Now every time I have to make an important decision, or I’m not sure what to do, I look at him and ask myself what he would want me to do.

—

With the help of all of these tools, I hope that one day, while I’m sitting on my deathbed, looking outside of the window while feeling emotional and full of questions, I at least know that I was happy with the life I lived.

If you dare to, go to https://lefterisoikonomou.com/en/memento-mori-calendar/ and print out your own weekly Memento Mori calendar.