Memento Vivere

For centuries, we have been encouraged to meditate on death. From Stoic practice to Victorian jewelry to contemporary tattoos, the idea of memento mori has been considered something of a cure for pride and an antidote to obsession with the things of this world. In an age of shallow consumerism, it remains crucial. But there are good reasons to think that at the present moment, what is more necessary is memento vivere–something we rarely hear about.

As true as it is that we often forget that we will die, it is also true that we sometimes forget that we are alive. Consider how often we describe ourselves as though we are machines. We speak of ourselves as operating on “autopilot.” We say that certain things are “hardwired” into us. We talk about whether our problems are “hardware” or “software” problems. Some people refer to our brains as “wetware.” We describe taciturn people as “robotic.” We wear watches that track our “body battery.” Health nuts want us to eat “clean fuel.”

While some people are unhappy about the seemingly redundant term “lived experience,” we increasingly have access to experiences which are not truly lived. People spend hours of their lives playing games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. You can attend “live” concerts in some of them. Virtual reality takes us deeper into artificial worlds, and VR headsets have become common in homes. Culturally, we seem to anticipate that we will do much of our “living” in virtual realms in the future. This is the prediction in Ready Player One and in the show The Peripheral, among others. The main character in Upload is living in the virtual realm after his physical death.

Mark Zuckerberg famously went all in on his “Metaverse.” It was a “vision of an immersive digital world” where we would all spend our time and live our lives via virtual reality. Fortunately, the Metaverse has finally died (after costing probably $80 billion). But it was not as crazy of a gamble as it seems now that it has failed. NFTs are in remission now, but Nike once sold an NFT sneaker for over $100,000. That’s over $100,000 for a virtual shoe. As long as we are looking for ways to inhabit other worlds rather than the one we are in, such schemes will keep popping up.

The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.

AI also muddies the waters about what it means to be human. Anthropic’s ad for Claude, “There’s hope in hard questions,” includes voiceovers from different people asking questions about AI and its possible uses and effects. The questions begin with concerns, like “Can AI be trusted?” or “If it ends up taking all the jobs, then what does it mean to work?” Some of the accompanying images seem troubling. Then the ad moves toward optimism. The piano in the background gets more upbeat and the images get happier. “If a machine can pretend to care, better than I can actually care, how do we draw the line there?” is asked in a voice that does not seem especially concerned. “If we all had a voice in it, then I feel like it would be better.” “Could AI help people stop feeling misunderstood?” The final images show humans in community, humans in nature, even a whale breaching. One question toward the end is: “What if we started to be more human?”

Memento mori asks us to contemplate our deaths. When a commercial like that is persuasive, it is high time to contemplate the lives we are living.

If we cannot tell the difference between ourselves and machines, it may not be that the machines are “that good.” It may be that our lives are that bad. If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.

We should be living in ways that make it clear that “wetware” is not a good term for the human brain and that the experiences in virtual reality are inferior to those outside of it. In the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction, a man named Harold Crick works for the IRS and lives a boring, routinized, solitary life. Things get a bit more interesting when he begins hearing a narrator and consults a professor of literature for help. Unfortunately, the narrator seems to be writing a tragedy and mentions an “imminent death.” Professor Hilbert tells Harold: “This narrator might very well kill you, so I humbly suggest that you just forget all this and go live your life.”

Harold: Go live my life? I am living my life. I’d like to continue to live my life.
Professor Hilbert: (sighs) I know. Of course. I mean all of it. However long you have left. You know, I mean, Harold, you could use it to have an adventure. You know, invent something, or just finish reading Crime and Punishment. Hell, Harold, you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted.
Harold:  What’s wrong  with you? Hey. I don’t wanna eat nothing but pancakes. I wanna live. Who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living…chooses pancakes?
Professor Hilbert: Harold, if you’d pause to think, I believe you’d realize that that answer’s inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led…and of course, the quality of the pancakes. You don’t understand what I’m saying.

Harold’s unique, human existence is so stale that Professor Hilbert is not certain it’s better than unlimited pancakes. But Harold’s memento mori in the narration of his impending doom leads him to embrace memento vivere. The narrator tells us Harold finally “did what countless punk-rock songs had told him to do so many times before: he lived his life.” Harold buys a guitar and learns to play, he asks out a girl he likes, and he gives Space Camp tickets to a friend. Harold laughs and loosens up. He makes human connections. He begins to experience the world he has merely existed in.

Harold Crick is fictional. Are we living in ways that appreciate being alive? In 2025, a piece in the real estate section of the New York Times was titled, “Yes, It’s Ok to Use the Fine China.” The decline of fine china may be a troubling trend when considered from the perspective of memento vivere. Pleasure and beauty remind us that we are alive. That piece references a famous quote from a 1977 Joan Didion interview. The interviewer suggests to Didion: “There’s a certain esthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.” She replies: “Well, every day is all there is.” Should it be noteworthy that some people live in ways which incorporate beauty and add a sense of elevation to their existence?

It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes. Memento mori has served us well for centuries, and it will continue to do so. But in times like these, we should turn up those punk-rock songs, contemplate our lives, and memento vivere.