But the idea that wasting time is a sin has become deeply ingrained, “due to the Reformation, which descended like a frost on Europe – where the church started banning carnival and summer fairs, and there were new laws banning public dancing and games. People had more spontaneous lives in the Middle Ages – “partly of course because death was so much closer,” he says. In terms of cultural history, most people are unaware that their spontaneity has been stolen from them over the past half a millennium.” “‘Just do it’ becomes ‘just plan it’ – people are filling up their electronic calendars weeks in advance with no free weekends. Instead of seizing the day, we’re really seizing the credit card.”Ĭarpe diem has also been hijacked by our culture of hyper-scheduled living, argues Krznaric. “That idea that instead of just doing it, we just buy it instead: shopping is the second most popular leisure activity in the Western world, beaten only by television. “Consumer culture has captured seizing the day,” he tells BBC Culture. “The hijack of carpe diem is the existential crime of the century – and one that we have barely noticed,” he writes. Krznaric argues that this has helped strip the concept of its true meaning. “It’s vital to try and recover this carpe diem instinct which is in all of us.”ĭespite – or perhaps because of – its prevalence in culture, carpe diem has been sabotaged by the language of the advertising slogan and the hashtag: ‘Just do it’ or ‘Yolo’ (you only live once). “Human beings have always had mediated experiences, ever since the invention of reading – but now things like TV have so removed us from direct experience of life that we’ve almost forgotten what it’s like,” he tells BBC Culture. That was nearly 50 years ago. The pace of life has been accelerating since – and what Mander described is increasingly widespread, according to the social philosopher Roman Krznaric. Through mere lack of exposure and practice, I’d lost the ability to feel it, tune into it, or care about it.
“Nature had become irrelevant to me, absent from my life. Mander recalled “childhood moments when the mere sight of the sky or grass would send waves of physical pleasure through me” – on the deck, though, “I felt dead,” he wrote.
“It struck me that there was a film between me and all of that,” he wrote in his 1977 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Leaning on the rail of a yacht in 1968, looking at the “rocky cliffs, rolling seas, dazzling sky” of the Dalmatian Straits, the writer and adman Jerry Mander had an epiphany.
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