When a Roman general won a major battle, the senate awarded him a triumphus. A triumphus was a massive public celebration that served both as a military parade and a religious rite. For hours the general stood in a chariot drawn by four white horses, wearing the toga picta and the laurel crown of Jupiter himself, the crowd of Rome screaming his name for the better part of a day. He was, in that moment, as close to a god as a Roman could get.
So the senate had a device to keep the general from forgetting he was but a mortal man.
A slave stood in the chariot directly behind him. For the entire parade, the slave’s only job was to lean into his ear and whisper:
“Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento.”
(Look behind you. Remember you are but a man.)
The whisper was not there to sharpen the general’s ambition. It was a weight placed against adoration so that the general’s head would not swell past the size of his helmet. It was, in the original sense, an instrument of humility and a constant reminder that he was but a mortal man.
Two thousand years later, on June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs stood in front of 23,000 people at Stanford Stadium in jeans and sandals under his black robe and used the same instrument for the opposite purpose. He told the graduates about a mirror. He had been looking into it every morning for 33 years. The question was always the same:
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
Whenever the answer was no for too many days in a row, Steve Jobs knew he needed to change something. Remembering that he would be dead soon, was the most important tool he had ever encountered to help him make the big choices in life.
The speech has been viewed more than 120 million times across multiple platforms, and is the most-watched commencement address in history.
Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the previous year. He would die of it 6 years later. And he had, by then, done something to his cancer that the speech does not mention and that the slave behind the chariot would have recognised as exactly the problem memento mori was designed to prevent.
How the Stoics did memento mori
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private journal around 170 AD, near the height of his reign as emperor, these words he never intended anyone else to read:
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
Epictetus told his students that when they kissed their child, they should remind themselves that they were kissing a mortal, so that the love would not be ruined by the grief that came later.
None of this was meant to feel good. It was meant to strip away illusion so that the person could see what was in front of them.
About 200 years before Aurelius’ writing, Horace published Odes I.11, which ended with a phrase that has been mistranslated in English for about a century:
“Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.”
The popular rendering, “Seize the day, trust tomorrow as little as possible,” makes it sound like a motivational poster. The actual Latin is a harvesting word — carpe — the kind used for plucking a ripe fruit at the precise moment it will not keep another day. Pluck the day, as one plucks an apple. Trust the next one as little as possible, because it may not come.
The Stoics had a way of holding death in one hand and the present moment in the other, and they insisted you needed both to live well. Memento mori was one half: remember you will die. Carpe diem was the other: pluck this day, tomorrow might not come. One reminded, the other instructed. You were supposed to do both.
In the modern translation, the two halves got separated. Memento mori survived in medallions, skull tattoos, and apps that count down your remaining Mondays. Carpe diem survived in Dead Poets Society, in YOLO, and in posters that tells you to live like it’s your last day, which is terrible advice if taken literally. Stripped from each other, neither half does the work alone.
When death stopped being abstract
Between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death killed an estimated 30% to 50% of Europe’s population. A continent that had buried half of itself could not pretend death was an abstraction.
The Dance of Death frescos appeared on church walls. Skeletons pulled popes, kings, merchants, and peasants into the same line.
The 17th-century Vanitas genre placed a skull next to a tulip and an hourglass: life, death and time. The Capuchin Crypt in Rome arranged the bones of around 3,700 friars into chandeliers and archways, with a sign that read:
“What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be.”
This is not self-help. It is a civilization making death so visible that nobody can pretend it is elsewhere. You walked into the chapel, and the chapel was made of your neighbours.
Then the plague moved out of Europe, sanitation improved, antibiotics were invented, and death was gradually relocated to the hospital and the nursing home, where most people now go to do it in private.
What the terror of death does to a person
In 1973, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. His argument, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, was that almost everything humans do, their religions, their nationalisms, their achievements and their cruelties, is a defence against the knowledge that they are going to die. Becker called the structures that absorb this terror hero systems. A hero system is any shared story that makes a person feel significant: the nation that will outlast them, the church that promises them eternity, the career that leaves something behind, or the family that carries their name forward. You plug yourself into something larger, and the fear quiets.
The system does not have to be true. It only has to be convincing enough to work. Countries, churches, careers and families give a person a way to feel they matter in a universe that will forget them.
Becker died of colon cancer in 1974, two months before his Pulitzer was announced.
Three social psychologists decided to test his argument empirically. Starting in 1986, they developed what they called Terror Management Theory, and over the following 30 years they ran hundreds of experiments with a single structure. You take a group of people. You “prime” half of them with mortality by asking them to imagine their own death in detail or interview them in front of a funeral parlour. The other half get a control prompt. Then you measure what changes.
What changes is almost always the same thing. After being reminded of death, people become more loyal to their own group, more hostile to outsiders, more prejudiced, more nationalistic, and more punitive toward those who violate their worldview. In one of the foundational 1989 studies municipal judges who were first asked to contemplate their own deaths set bail for a prostitute at an average of $455. Judges who were not primed set it at $50.
The reminder of death, in other words, does not generally produce Marcus Aurelius. It produces someone who needs an enemy and a hanging judge.
The 2020 pandemic turned the globe into a terror management laboratory. Studies found that as COVID death tolls rose in the United States, Indonesia, Mexico and Japan, mortality salience increased, collectivism increased, and news consumption, political identification, and worldview defence all sharpened. Republican-leaning counties and Democratic-leaning counties did not grieve the dead together; they argued about whether the dead were real, whether the masks worked, and whether the vaccines were poison.
Becker had predicted this in 1975. Only scapegoats, he wrote, can relieve one of his own stark death fear.
The death of Ivan Ilyich
In 1886, Leo Tolstoy published a novella that compressed all of this into a single person’s dying. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a 45-year-old Russian judge who slowly dies of a disease Tolstoy never names.
Tolstoy’s line about him is the most frequently quoted sentence in the novella:
“Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
Ivan has done everything right. He has made the correct marriage, acquired the correct furniture, pursued the correct career, and displayed the correct opinions. What the dying forces him to see is that none of it was his. He had lived someone else’s life, and now there was no time left to live his own. On his deathbed he pities his son for the first time, and pities his wife, and forgives them, and the terror dissolves into something closer to grace. But only in the final hours, and only because the illusion had been burned off by pain.
Tolstoy himself was 58 when he wrote it and had recently come through a religious crisis in which he had contemplated suicide. He was testing on the page what his characters would eventually teach him. He did not spare himself. The dying Ivan Ilyich is Tolstoy practising his own death.
The memento mori subscription
In 2017, a former yoga teacher named Hansa Bergwall launched an iPhone app called WeCroak. The app does one thing. 5 times a day, at random intervals between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., it sends the user a push notification that reads:
“Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”
The app was inspired by a Bhutanese saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day. Death is embedded in the culture with funerals, prayer flags, sky burials, and a government that has declared Gross National Happiness more important than GDP.
In San Francisco, it is embedded in a $3.99 subscription that competes with meditation apps for attention. The whisper behind the chariot is now a notification between a Slack mention and a DoorDash update. The instrument is the same. The words remain, but the chariot, the general, the chapel wall, and the two thousand years of scaffolding around it are gone.
The man who would not die
On the other side of this inversion, meet Bryan Johnson.
Johnson sold his payment-processing company Braintree to PayPal in 2013 for $800 million. In 2021 he launched Project Blueprint, an anti-aging protocol that now costs him around $2 million per year. He takes more than 40 supplements daily, eats a strict vegan diet (about 1,977 calories a day, engineered to the gram), goes to bed at 8:30 p.m., tracks nighttime erections as a biomarker, and has briefly experimented with plasma transfusions from his teenage son. His philosophy rendered on his website in all caps is:
“DON’T DIE.”
In October 2025, Blueprint raised $60 million in funding from a coalition that included Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Naval Ravikant, and assorted Silicon Valley tech investors. Johnson told Time that Don’t Die is the next major ideology for the human race, on par with democracy, capitalism, Islam and Christianity.
He is not alone. Peter Thiel has publicly said he wants to live forever and has experimented with young-blood transfusions. Jeff Bezos in 2022 invested over a billion dollars in Altos Labs, a cellular-rejuvenation biotech. Cryonics companies now hold several hundred frozen bodies and thousands of contractually committed ones.
This is not a rejection of memento mori. It is its perfect completion. If you truly believe you are going to die, and you truly believe that is intolerable, and you have the money, the technology, and the intelligence to do something about it, Bryan Johnson is what you do.
The Stoic remembered death in order to live virtuously in the time he had. The Silicon Valley longevity investor remembers death in order to try to cancel it. Both positions take the reminder with equal seriousness, but they draw opposite conclusions about what to do about it.
How to memento mori
The hopeful reading of memento mori is the one Jobs delivered at Stanford. Remember that you are going to die, and the trivial falls away, and what remains is what matters.
However, the terror management literature suggests this only happens to a minority of people who contemplate death. The majority response shown across hundreds of experiments and confirmed at population scale during COVID, is not clarity but contraction. The reminder makes us more tribal, more defensive, more punitive, and more afraid.
If the practice generally produces the hanging judge rather than the philosopher-king, what was Marcus Aurelius doing that the WeCroak user isn’t?
Three things, as far as the record shows.
1. Do the work
The memento mori practice was embedded in a disciplined system with daily writing, evening review, and a clear ethical framework into which the death-awareness had to feed. For Marcus Aurelius the reminder was not the practice. The reminder was the opening line of the practice. What followed was the actual work of examining the day, naming where he had failed, locating what he could control, deciding how to act tomorrow. The WeCroak notification replicates the opening line and drops everything after it.
2. Start plucking
The second thing the Stoics had was the other half of the formula. Carpe diem was not opposed to memento mori. It was its operational conclusion. Memento mori without carpe diem is a skull on a desk. Carpe diem without memento mori is a marketing campaign for energy drinks. They need to operate together. Remember you are going to die, and therefore turn your attention to this day you have been given, and extract from it what is there to extract. The modern reader generally gets one half or the other. The people who actually do better with the reminder tend to be the ones who instinctively pair it with the plucking.
3. Find your community
The Stoics practised in community, over decades, inside a culture that treated philosophy as a way of life rather than a reading list. The practice had a scaffolding. It was transmitted person to person, not notification to individual. Strip away the community and the culture that knew what philosophy was for, and what remains is a 5-second confrontation with mortality that has nowhere to go and nothing waiting on the other side of it.
Put these three conditions together and a picture emerges of what the Stoic response actually required. It was not a reminder. It was a full architecture of attention, sustained for years, around a reminder that occupied a small part of it.
There is one group that reliably gets the Stoic outcome without having to build the architecture. They are also the people least likely to have chosen it.
The ones who have actually died
A 2001 study followed 344 Dutch cardiac-arrest survivors from ten hospitals. 62 of them reported near-death experiences (NDE). The researchers interviewed both groups at 2 years and at 8 years, and discovered something different with the NDE group.
The people in the NDE group reported significantly reduced fear of death. They reported greater empathy. They reported lower materialism, stronger interest in the meaning of life, and an increase in what the researchers called prosocial attitudes. The effects were still present, and in some cases more pronounced, at the 8-year follow-up than at the 2-year one. Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia has documented more than 1,000 similar cases over the course of a 50-year career:
“People with near-death experiences have a greater appreciation for life, higher self-esteem, more compassion, less concern with acquiring material wealth, a heightened sense of purpose, and no longer worry about death.”
These are the outcomes the Stoics said memento mori would produce. The NDE survivors get them without the daily practice.
So why does an overwhelming physiological encounter with death work where the cognitive reminder generally doesn’t?
The terror management theory argue that death anxiety operates largely outside conscious awareness, and that the worldview defence and the scapegoating is the machine the mind uses to keep the terror suppressed. A notification does not overwhelm that machine. It activates it. The machine fires up, finds an enemy, reaffirms the worldview, and the person feels more certain rather than more awake.
A cardiac arrest is different. The worldview is not defended; it is suspended. Whatever happens during those minutes — the tunnel, the light, the life review, the encounter with deceased relatives, happens in a mind that is no longer running the program that normally distances a person from their own death. When the machine restarts, something in it has been reset. The fear of death goes down because the suppression of the fear of death is no longer necessary.
The Stoics, over decades of practice, appear to have built a partial version of this reset the hard way. A lifetime of writing out one’s own death in detail, paired with structured daily reflection and carpe diem’s attention to the ripe moment, eventually lowers the defensive apparatus by wearing it down rather than overwhelming it. This is why it took Marcus Aurelius ten years of journaling to sound like Marcus Aurelius. Most people do not have ten years of journaling in them. Very few have a cardiac arrest scheduled.
The advice falls out of this almost by itself. Do not treat memento mori as a motivational tool. It is not one, and the research suggests that using it as one is more likely to make you worse than better. Treat it as the opening of a practice, not the practice itself. Pair it with carpe diem, and turn your attention to this specific day, this specific cup, this specific person. Build a habit of writing your reflections and a community of people doing the same thing.
And accept that the full transformation the NDE survivors describe is probably not on the menu for you, and that’s fine, because you get to live longer.
The death in the mirror
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour in October 2003. His doctors told him it was rare and slow-growing and that, unlike the more common pancreatic adenocarcinoma, it was surgically curable if caught early. He was, they said, lucky.
For 9 months he refused the surgery.
Walter Isaacson’s biography documents what Jobs did instead. He pursued a strict vegan diet. He fasted for long periods. He drank large amounts of fruit juice. He tried acupuncture and herbal remedies he had found on the internet. He consulted psychics. His family, his friends, and his physicians begged him to have the operation. He kept refusing.
By the time Jobs agreed to the Whipple procedure in July 2004, the cancer had metastasized. Harvard surgical oncology researcher Ramzi Amri argued publicly that Jobs had probably hastened his own death by years. According to Isaacson, Jobs in his last years told him directly that he regretted the delay and wanted to talk about it.
Eleven months after the Stanford speech about the mirror, his tumour was in his liver.
The slave in the chariot was not there to make the general feel alive. He was there to tell him he was not a god. Jobs used the instrument the other way around, and he did it brilliantly, and it worked on a billion people who watched the video, but it did not work on him. The reminder he carried every morning did not deflate his conviction that he could think his way out of biology. It fuelled that conviction. It told him every day that his choices mattered more than anyone else’s, and when the choice in front of him was juice versus surgery, the choices that mattered most were his.
Somewhere in a Dutch hospital in the 1990s, a man whose heart had stopped for 6 minutes was waking up and telling a nurse he was no longer afraid. He would go on, over the next eight years, to become less interested in money, more interested in other people, less frightened of dying, and more attentive to the ripe day in front of him. He did not earn this through practice. He did not meditate for 33 years in front of a mirror. He was dragged through it against his will and came back different on the other side.
This is what memento mori was trying, imperfectly, to approximate. A reminder stands no chance against the machinery the mind uses to hide from death. An event large enough to break the machinery stands a chance. The whisper in the chariot was the best the Romans could do without killing the general. It turns out that, short of actually killing him, the whisper was never going to be enough.
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