“This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Although my favorite movies are from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, this is an exception. Fight Club is one of my favorite movies, ever! There are so many reasons that it is a classic (and that deserves a post on its own).
One of the things that I love about the movie is it’s depth – it is full of questioning the status quo of our society, of making you question your reality, and piercing insights into the emptiness of consumerism, of mental illness, and the shortcomings of many aspects of our modern Western lives.
This is a simple Memento mori. The clock is ticking.
***A memento mori is a reminder of death. It is a key practice in Stoicism but is not unique to it. It can be a simple visual reminder or quote or a more serious mediation on death. Stoics use it to remind themselves of how short and fragile life is and therefore how much we have to be grateful for, to live virtuous lives, and not to waste our time.
In this series, each Monday, I will post a memento mori from various sources, either from the primary Stoic texts themselves or other sources.