When a poet speaks it would be wise to listen, since he is sharing a personal nugget and stance on a common human condition. The details of interpretations and the specific colors and nuances are yours to gather and assemble as you please but the heart and sentiment rarely wobbles as far away from the axis as that of “Carpe Diem” did in the contemporary.

Horace was a poet rather than a philosopher so he left his argument opened and free flowing. The “Carpe Diem ” phrase, you now hear bastardized at every corner for all purposes, was actually a part of an 8 line poem, in which the last 2 lines took it home: “Even as we speak envious time flies past, seize the day and leave as little as possible for tomorrow.” The “seize the day” part has been translated in various ways as pluck, harvest, enjoy… but it tallies up pretty much in the similar neighborhood of notions. But as time passed the entirety of the verse was dropped and, as we would like things to be short an easy by our nature, only the “Carpe Diem” remained – a single phrase that exploded in the 17th century in defense of hedonism, bodily pleasures, sexual explorations, gastronomical delights and gorging on the beauty of sensory joys. There was even a special branch of poetry called carpe diem poetry devoted to hedonism. As the 18th and 19th centuries rolled about with a stronger accent on individualism it was used more to describe grabbing the opportunities for ourselves while the last few decades see it appropriated to the mindfulness movement as an extension of being in the now. In the final instance it has become appropriated to the consumer culture as a marketing trinket, a catchy slogan by a masterful high jacking to do the complete opposite of the original intention that Horace had. He wanted to remind you that there is an expiration date and that your time here was limited. By the sheer agency of recognizing your mortality and not fearing it ( while consumer culture tries to pretend that there is no death or decay in its retouched imagery and offers eternal life through consumption cycles), you get to live, restructure your decisions and align them with doing something meaningful instead of spending time on vacant meaninglessness.

Do meaningful things, as much of them as you can fit in a day – that is the meaning of the phrase. Go out and get real experiences, not mediated, simulated or sterilized. Act, try things! Experience has a two words in it combined – the word experiment and periculum meaning danger. Yes, it is dangerous and it demands courage, but it also brings about real experiential knowledge and wisdom because there re some things you can never fully know or understand by just thought experiments and rationalization – you need to experience them to fully grasp. So no, it was not meant to justify indulging, YOLO or hedonism, but to make you work and get things done. There is no infinite amount of diems. Carpe this one. Do your best. A good life is a series of good days in which you tried. So try.