You Only Live ... Twice (?)
There is a moment where something inside you short-circuits. A friend calls. There is a party, a trip, a concert, a once-in-a-lifetime thing happening right now. You had plans carefully curated in a spreadsheet or a colour-coded calendar accompanied by a reasonable bedtime. And then, in about 5 seconds flat, all of it dissolves. You say yes. You go. You either have the best night of your life, or you end up standing in the middle of nowhere or stumble back home at 3 am, wondering how it all came down to this. Welcome to the philosophical mess we have made of the present tense for ourselves.
by Mihika Malhotra · 2 min read
The phrase You Only Live Once started as a battle cry and became, somewhere along the way, an existential permission slip. Philosophers have long grappled with the problem of mortality and how it should shape the world we live in. Epicurus urged us to pursue simple pleasures. The Stoics told us to memento mori – remember that you will die – not as a cause for panic, but as a reason to live deliberately. Even Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence was, at its core, a question: if you had to live this exact moment again, forever, would you choose it?
YOLO is a pop-philosophy version of all of this. It is memento mori, personified, sending you multiple reminders throughout the day. However, at its heart, it is asking something vital: if life is finite, shouldn’t we live every single moment?
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