“Think Of Yourself As Dead. You Have Lived Your Life. Now Take What’s Left And Live It Properly”

This quote from Marcus Aurelius puts life properly into perspective. How you should live your life, what you should care about, and what is important. Too often, we care about things that in the long run are meaningless. We can’t always take this perspective, but it is important to do so every so often.

But what does this quote mean? What does it mean to think of yourself as dead and “take what’s left and live it properly.” I take this to mean to think about what you will care about and be proud of in your life when you are on your death bed. When you think about that, you’ll figure out what really matters in life.

Are you going to care about making a little extra money, or impressing acquaintances? Will you care about the type of car you drive, or the professional success you have? To be fair, you might get genuine pleasure out of those things. But usually, you will look back at the time you spent with your loved ones. You will be remembered for how good a person you are, not your accomplishments.

If you can be satisfied with the simple things, with the day to day experience with your family, you will probably be happier than someone who has more material wealth than you, but constantly needs more. But it’s not just about being content with simple things. This quote is about thinking about what constitutes living a proper life.

If you were told that you had a limited time left in your life, what would you focus on? While this doesn’t apply to everybody, most people would focus on the aforementioned simpler, more important things in your life, related to loved ones. They would not spend most of the short time they have left on things like impressing other people or furthering their career.

When you realize that after you die, not that many people are going to remember you, you realize that doing things to impress other people does not matter as much as you’d otherwise think. A few years after you die, you’re much more likely to remembered by your kids as a good parent, by your siblings as a great brother, by your close friends as a great person, than by someone who worked with you as someone who rose up the ranks.

I could go on, but by now you should understand the point. I’m not exactly telling you anything new. But maybe you can keep this in the back of your mind. So the next time you are feeling too up or too down about things in life that in the grand scheme of things are not that important, you can remind yourself about what really matters.