emacs-memento-mori

Reminder of our mortality.

"Memento Mori," or consciously remembering one's own death, has a long history in Western philosophical thought. It is a way of reminding oneself that death is inevitable, thereby increasing gratitude for the time left, and motivation to live to the fullest.

Death, of course, is not the only ending, and so this package allows you to choose what to be reminded of (including time since some event such as your birth). Every day it will choose a new memento randomly and put it into `global-mode-string' which is usually displayed in the mode line. There is also an option to show it in the frame title instead of the global-mode-string.

Installation

Install from MELPA.

Usage

• Customize memento-mori-mementos
• enable memento-mori-mode
• reflect

e.g. If you have something like the following in your emacs config

(require 'memento-mori)
(setq memento-mori-mementos
      '(("%.5Y years old" :since "1970-01-01")))
(memento-mori-mode)

Or using use-package:

(use-package memento-mori
  :ensure t
  :custom (memento-mori-mementos
           '(("%.5Y years old" :since "1970-01-01")))
  :config (memento-mori-mode))

You'll see something like 49.54 years old in your modeline.

Customization

This package will likely not be useful to anyone out of the box. To have a meaningful experience you should customize memento-mementos. You can do this by running M-x customize-group RET memento RET. While it's unlikely that these exact questions will have the desired psychological impact for you, here are a few example items which you can refer to when creating your own.

Some questions to consider:

• How long until you will "likely" die? I used https://population.io/ to get an estimate of when I will die based on just birth date, country, and gender. Undoubtedly, a better estimate could be had with more information (e.g. about general health), but it was simple and it's only an estimate.
• What percentage of your life have you "likely" lived?
• How long until your child(ren) will leave home?
• How many more vacations you will take (with your children)?
• How long until your (grand)parents die?
• How long until you are no longer a 20-something?
• How long until you reach "peak unhappiness" (47.2 years old)?
• How long has it been since some traumatic experience?

Consider using weeks or fractional years. That way you can see the number change every so often and be reminded how short life actually is. This package is not meant to be a count-down timer, so it only updates once a day, but noticing a change helps to encourage the desired reflection.

If the mode-line is too much, you could add it to your org-agenda-custom-commands or similar.

You can also set memento-mori-initial-scratch-message to a format something like "%q\n\n%m\n" so that the initial scratch buffer will contain a random quote followed by the current memento.

Contributing

Feel free to open issues, pull requests, etc. In particular, I'm sure there are many good quotes that I didn't include in memento-mori-quotes, so please send them in! Also if you have a good memento, I would love to have those too.