There’s this episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that actually made me cry. Like we’re talking genuine tears. If I even try to tell someone about it now I feel myself getting choked up, which puts me in a weird position of having to decide whether to press on through Raspy Teary Voice with my plot summary of a Star Trek: TNG episode (already a bad idea why, did I start describing a TV show in the first place) or to give up and admit that I am too moved by the exploits of Jean-Luc Picard and Mr. Worf and that smug-ass Riker to continue this conversation.
The episode is called “The Inner Light.” The gist of it is (here comes that damn plot summary), the big homie Picard is standing there on the Enterprise when he’s hit with a beam of some sort from some lone space probe thing. It knocks him unconscious, and when he comes to he’s on some unfamiliar planet with a bunch of people calling him by a different name and acting like he’s always lived there.
Back on the ship, the crew is standing around his unconscious body, trying to help him. From their perspective he’s only out for a matter of minutes or maybe a couple hours. But to Picard, he basically lives a whole other lifetime on this planet in that time.
(This show spent its entire costume/makeup budget on Klingons and everyone else just had to make do with knockoff hypercolor shirts.)
I won’t spoil the entire thing for you (seriously you should watch it and see if you don’t cry too, then come talk your tough guy bullshit), but at some point Picard has a family and an adult daughter on this other planet and now he’s talking to that daughter about her future plans. She, like Picard, has come to realize that this planet won’t be around much longer. She thinks maybe she should go ahead and marry her boyfriend and start her own family sooner rather than later. Picard supports this idea, because he knows they’re all going to fucking die here.
“Live now,” he tells her in one memorable scene. “Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”
This advice seems poignant but also somewhat obvious in the context of the episode. By this point, we realize the planet they’re on is doomed. So yeah, might as well give yourself over to love and family and art and joy. Don’t wait for later. There will not be very much later since you’ll all be dead soon.
But then you stop and realize, oh wait that is also the situation we find ourselves in on this planet. Not because our planet is necessarily doomed (though it’s not exactly looking great at the moment, at least for humans), but because we are mortal and shit. We are temporary. The planet may or may not survive, but it’s guaranteed that we won’t. So what the hell are you waiting for? Go do your shit — whatever that is — now.
We’ve all heard this advice couched in other cliché sayings before. Live every day like it’s your last, etcetera. This is pretty useless, of course, because if this was really your last day you wouldn’t go to work or plan a trip or floss your teeth or eat your vegetables or save your money. You can’t live like that for long before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you die toothless in the streets.
I think most of us are in very little danger of taking that advice too literally, though. We’re in far more danger of always assuming we’ve got more time than we do. You keep meaning to learn to play the piano or go see Rome or shed the last restrictive robes of your self-consciousness but you think, ah, I’m busy. I’ll get to it later. But there might be less later than you think.
There’s a famous Joan Didion quote about why she believes in using the good silver every day. Her reasoning is pretty simple: “every day is all there is.”
We know this intellectually, but we struggle to really believe it. We have plans. We have a future. We have shit that has to get done today so we can have a better tomorrow. It all makes sense, but it also gets out of hand. Maybe you can’t live like there’s no tomorrow, but you also lose something when you live like there are endless tomorrows.
I had a philosophy professor in college who said that the biggest difference between humans and other animals isn’t language or thumbs or bipedal movement — it’s that we know we’ll die.
People do all sorts of different stuff with this knowledge. They make up fairy tales about eternal life. They try to leave some sort of lasting legacy in one career field or another. It’s probably a huge part of our drive to have children, the ongoing care of which forces us to do a whole lot less living for today. It freaks us out to imagine a future world without us in it. But if we’re being real with ourselves we also know that, for the most part, the world will not even notice that we were here or have gone.
That’s the gut-wrenching takeaway of that Star Trek episode, btw. (If you made it this far, well, I’m going to spoil it now.) This whole space probe beam thing to make Jean-Luc think he’d lived this whole other life on a whole other planet? It was a clever illusion pulled off by the people who knew they were living on a dying planet. They knew their whole world and culture would soon disappear. And dammit, they just wanted someone to know they’d been there.
That’s a lot of what it is to be human, isn’t it. We’re here. We know it won’t last but also can’t easily accept that. We understand just enough to freak out about it. We’re not always sure what to do with those feelings. But every day is all there is. Your life is just a series of every days. Then you run out.