3_Trends_Vol.15: Sarah Unger: Memento Mori, Natural Awe + Four Day Week

The very awareness of mortality suddenly puts life into bold relief. No aspect of life can be taken for granted; no feature of one’s personal way is either eternal or absolutely necessary. Thus, one can review, fine-tune, or alter with a new consciousness of alternatives.

We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consci

This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community—participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it. And it leads t

The question is, What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty—the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions into your precious four thousand weeks. On the other hand, there’s the profoun