Social philosopher Mr Roman Krznaric explains how to stop procrastinating and start doing.

This may sound familiar: “We are food for worms, lads. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold and die… Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” It’s Mr Robin Williams, of course, playing the inspiring English teacher Mr Keating in Dead Poets Society.

That Latin maxim, carpe diem – first used by the Roman poet Horace more than 2,000 years ago (and literally translated as pluck the day) – retains an extraordinary popularity in modern culture. The actress Dame Judi Dench had it tattooed on her wrist for her 81st birthday. You can even buy T-shirts that say, “Carpe That F****ing Diem” (not that we’d recommend wearing one).

But there’s a problem. The spirit of carpe diem has been hijacked. Consumer culture has reduced it to Black Friday shopping sales with seize-the-day messaging such as, “Buy while stocks last!” Our hyper-planning habits mean we’re so busy filling up our electronic calendars that we’ve little time left for spontaneous, carpe diem living. And our phones – which we check on average 110 times per day – have made us live in a state of continuous partial attention. We’ve become spectators of life on the screen rather than living it directly ourselves. Horace – and Mr Keating – would have been horrified.

So, is there anything we can do to reclaim carpe diem from the hijackers? I would argue yes. In my book Carpe Diem Regained I take a look at the history of the concept, and the different ways in which we can recalibrate it to help us in our everyday lives. Below, I outline three of them.

There’s another film that appears to be about seizing the day: The Bucket List. Two old gentlemen (played by Messrs Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman) discover they have just a year to live. So they write a bucket list of adventurous things to do before they die and get cracking. They try skydiving, ride motorbikes down the Great Wall of China, and go on an African safari. But in the end they realise that all these macho, #YOLO (you only live once) activities are really just giving them an accumulation of superficial experiences. What really matters to them is having the courage to seize the day in their personal relationships, with one character eventually reconciling with his daughter, and the other with his wife. There’s a clear lesson – forget the bucket list and practise carpe diem in your emotional life. It’s less risky than skydiving and ultimately more rewarding.

Here’s something interesting: men typically procrastinate more than women. One area where this happens a lot is in career change. We might hate our job so do lots of thinking and planning to pinpoint an alternative, but often do nothing about it because we’re so afraid of making the wrong choice. Instead of thinking first, acting later, we need to take a more carpe diem experiential route of acting first, thinking afterwards, by doing things such as job shadowing, volunteering or conducting experiments on the side. So, if you dream of being a web designer rather than an accountant, instead of chucking in your job completely, you might do some freelance web design at the weekends to test out this alternative in reality. After doing enough of this experimenting, you’ll have the courage to overcome your procrastination and make that big step into a different future.

If you really want to master carpe diem living, I recommend a daily death pause. Think about your impending mortality for at least five minutes a day. Mr Steve Jobs used to stand in front of the mirror each morning and ask himself this: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” He claimed that if the answer were “no” for too many days in a row, he knew he had to make a change. That’s a pretty good formula for how to live before you die.

Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art Of Seizing The Day (Unbound), by Mr Roman Krznaric is out now

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