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Carpe Diem Isn’t Sacrosanct

Note: My humorous pieces usually begin with me being angry. This one, which won a contest, was a reaction to certain people pressuring me to do things I didn\’t want to do. Friends who do things to annoy me get essays hurled at them. This rant was one of my missiles.

“Carpe diem” has been offered to me as a moral tenet to persuade me to get drunk, elope, become a New York starving artist, hitch-hike to Vegas, and pursue wild, superficial sex with strangers.
I\’m sorry, but “carpe diem” isn\’t sacrosanct.
Don\’t misunderstand. It\’s always uplifting when I see it on a t-shirt. Take risks, it says. Live vigorously. It offers permission to act impulsively, even irresponsibly, with a free conscience, which is refreshing after twelve years of being brow-beaten by a monolithic school system.
However, it ceases to be liberating when people start to quote it as scripture for purposes of manipulation. Not that the idea itself is bad.
It\’s just that “carpe diem,” like most abstract principles, loses its value when someone tries to act on it in every situation, blindly ignoring obvious facts. What usually results is a type of compulsive fanaticism.
In the worst case scenario, every impulsive flight to Saskatchewan, every act of insensitivity, every temper tantrum or gambling excess becomes justified by a slogan. Simple pleasures, such as reading, doing puzzles, or anything involving thinking is tacitly condemned or ridiculed as “not carpe diem enough.”
When accompanied to Baskin Robbins with a “carpe diem” fanatic, you suddenly feel compelled to try all 32 flavors, so you can no longer try the same flavor twice even if your true and deeply passionate craving is for Rocky Road.
Before you know it, you find yourself going to scorching Lollapalooza festivals when you\’d rather stay home, ruining perfectly good clothes in mud wrestling contests, and feeling guilty for staying home and watching The Simpsons when you should be out getting drunk. What is meant to be a liberating concept becomes a tedious litany of “shoulds” and “shouldn\’ts,” formed not by the Golden Rule, but by misquoted Nietzsche slogans and smug Latin phrases stolen from dead tongues.
When you are in a restaurant with a carpe diem zealot, the most mundane conversations suddenly become matters of great existential consequence.
“That meat loaf looks good,” you say.
“Yeah,” says the zealot. “I like to try different things sometimes.”
You try to ignore the contempt in his voice as he looks down at your sad chicken leg half propped against a small blob of rice pilaf – the same dish you have ordered for the last seven times in a row.
“But I like chicken,” you say. “And it\’s low in fat.”
“Carpe diem,” he says, as if that settles the matter. “You know – in fact, we should hitch-hike to Philly tonight. Wouldn\’t it be cool? The weather\’s perfect.”
“But it\’s hailing outside. We\’ll get struck by lightening.”
“So? Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in the lightening. Carpe diem, man.”
“But…”
“Hel-lo-o? You must not have heard me correct-ly. I said, carpe diem!
“Well -er- carpe diem? Well, okay.”
Of course, carpe diem is a perfectly respectable and valid tenet for a philosophy that uses irksome war images to describe humankind\’s relationship with time.
However, I refuse to be a slave to carpe diem. Yes, it looks great it looks on sweaters, but it is a phrase, not a religion. Carpe Diem isn\’t sacrosanct. It isn\’t even English. And when anything claiming to grant freedom begins to erode it instead, it is time to cast it aside.
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