Many people were shocked to read about the accidental death of American writer Dave Freeman, aged 47, even if they'd never heard of him before. It's not just his relative youth; there is the curious coincidence that Dave Freeman wrote the book 100 Things to Do Before You Die.
His co-author, Neil Teplica, explained: 'The book's title meant you should live every day like it would be your last and there's not that many people who do. It's a credit to Dave; he didn't have enough days, but he lived them like he should have.'
I'm glad for Dave and for any of his circle in Los Angeles who take comfort from this idea, but a strange buzz struck up in my bonnet at the advice on how one 'should' be living. It turned out, funnily enough, to be a bee.
We seem to be inundated by instructions to 'Live each day as if it were the last', along with its modern motivational cousins 'Live life to the full' and 'Live in the now'. This translates as: 'HAVE FUN ALL THE TIME! Otherwise you have failed.' Is broadband to blame? It made everything immediate; if everything is immediate, then any moment that isn't enjoyed is squandered. If we aren't on holiday all the time, we are doing life wrong.
What Neil Teplica means is that Dave Freeman ran with the bulls in Pamplona. He watched tribesmen bungee-jumping on the Pacific island of Vanuatu. He attended the festival of Las Fallas, in which papier-maché statues of politicians are burnt in front of an ululating crowd.
(If you literally lived each day as if it were your last, you would never do any of these things. They take planning. If I were entering my final 24 hours on Earth, I would not spend them trying to find discount flights to Vanuatu or building David Miliband out of old newspapers.)
I am sure that Dave Freeman was a lovely man and deserved his holidays. It's only the instruction manual that makes me queasy. I suspect it is no coincidence that, as well as being a writer, Dave Freeman was an advertising executive. It is commercial hype that tells us a rich and full life cannot be lived without foreign travel, fast cars and extreme sports. This is just a way to sell plane tickets.
It denies the fact that you can have as 'full' an experience reading a book, or talking to an old friend, as you can white-water rafting down the Amazon. It's the mindset that matters, not the location. Doing life right, according to the Freeman Principle, requires a lot of money, props and vehicles; I'd say his surname is more ironic than apt.
True, I speak with the bitterness of one who has never got the balance right between spontaneity and planning. I gamble, stay up late and forget to have children, as if there were no tomorrow. I spend a lot of time in a casino where, literally, there are no clocks. And yet, if you told me to pack my bags and join you on the next flight to Tahiti I would say: 'Ooh goodness no, I've got the plumber coming on Tuesday.'
I'm so organised, I despise myself. Planning, planning, on the small stuff. Making lists. Different coloured pens for the diary. Candles in case of a power cut. Get the chicken out of the oven before the credits start on X Factor, so it will have finished 'resting' by the first ad break, then everything can be on the plate exactly as part two begins, as long as I use three hobs and a series of small alarm clocks ...
So, of course I'm enraged to see the gypsies whirling around, carping the diem and drag-racing round the pyramids, while I sit here paying my water bill because it's due in October and I might forget otherwise.
I'd like to 'live in the now', because then I wouldn't have to do any work. Or get a pension. Or a haircut. Or file my tax return. The problem is, if tomorrow did come after all, I would find myself skint, hairy and audited.
Meanwhile, I still haven't given up smoking, so the bit of me that does 'just enjoy today' is, frankly, a moron. I need more forethought, not less. If I stopped planning the next fortnight and started planning the next five years, I might actually have some children and my health. I'll tell you who lives each day as if it were his last: an alcoholic.
I'm sure that fulfilment cannot be had without understanding there is a past and a future; not just in terms of learning from previous mistakes and thinking ahead, but also in the sense of a world existing before we got here and after we're gone. All this incitement to jet between Vanuatu and Pamplona is just so much hedonistic bullshit, boosting fuel consumption as if the Earth had no tomorrow either.
If you 'live in the now', then you can sell off all the council houses, raze all the trees and feel perfectly sanguine about the fate of polar bears because there are at least 12 left and that's plenty to be getting on with. So you'd better hope you're the only one who's thinking that way. Besides, ask yourself: what would you really do if this were your last day on Earth? Would you go scuba-diving with sharks? Head for a Brazilian fiesta? Abseil down the Lincoln Memorial?
Of course you bloody wouldn't. Even if you were perfectly healthy and had simply been given a tip-off from a skilled tarot reader, you'd be so overwhelmed by the imminence of unconsciousness that you'd spend the day curled up on the sofa at home, alone, or with the person you like most. If so, congratulations! That's probably how you were going to spend your Sunday anyway.
