17.1.06

Death & Life. The 'Live Now' Trend

So death is a very real possibility in today's environment. People are naturally afraid. However, some brands have actually captured something positive out of this, whether they made the connection in the planning process or not I don't know but the resultant campaigns say a lot about our re-newd need to just LIVE NOW. Worrying about later is not that big a deal, Now is the most important. Seneca said it ages ago: 'We can't be happy because we are obsessed with the future and we forgot to live the now", he also said: 'Live each day as if it was a lifetime'. If you pass by St Martin's in Totenham court road try and catch a glimpse of their window gallery. One of their students made two road signs with the word 'death' on each. The arrows on the signs point to the left and to the right each and of-course he put them pointing away from each other in the two windows. So basically he is saying if you go left you die, if you go right you die too. Brilliant execution of the ultimate truth that ever was in this world we all die sooner later. Yeppee. In a book about thought experiments called the Pig That Wants to Be Eaten there is the famous problem of 'Quality of life' v 'Quantity of life'. Assume you could eliminate death completely and you could live for ever, would you do it? I know I wouldn't.