Live Every Day Like It's Your Last...

is, roughly, how the saying goes, intending to encourage us to live fuller, more meaningful lives than our current, presumably desultory, ones. The sentiment finds expression in a variety of settings, whether it be coaches exhorting their players to play each game passionately, as if it were their last, or "life coaches" suggesting that being conscious of the fact of one's mortality can make one shed self-imposed inhibitions to greatness. Preachers, too, have a habit of pleading with their flock to return to the straight-and-narrow, pointing out that Judgment Day will arrive suddenly, perhaps even as soon as tomorrow, and that this event will extinguish all second chances at redemption (i.e., you're screwed).

The Latin phrase, Memento mori, captures this idea, essentially saying, "Remember that you will die." Naturally, this morbid idea spawned an entire school of art in Rome during the 17th and 18th centuries. Sir Robin Williams, in the movie, Dead Poets Society, inspired his students to carpe diem, Latin for "seize the day." This, of course, is slightly different from memento-ing your mori. The former merely points out that because we don't know when our mori will overtake us, we ought to carpe the heck out of our diem and make the most of it.

Scientists, being scientists and unable to leave such morbidity alone, prefer to conduct experiments on lab rats. Calling it "mortality salience," one scientist tested the idea on judges in Arizona, attempting to see the effect of awareness of one's mortality on one's world views. The honorable lab rats confirmed the scientist's premise that mortality salience "increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one's cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different."

Keep that in mind when you tell someone to live their day as if it were their last; all you may be doing is to make them more rigid in their existing views.