It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

We know it, we don't live it

We talk about "just passing through" like it's wisdom, but do we actually live like we believe it? Most of us organize our entire existence as if we're building a permanent settlement. We stress about the perfect house, the right job title, winning arguments that won't matter in five years. There's something both comforting and unsettling about Plato's observation that life is temporary—it should free us from small tyrannies, yet somehow doesn't.

The tricky part is that treating life as temporary doesn't mean being reckless or indifferent. Actually, the opposite. If you genuinely accepted that this is temporary, you'd probably pay more attention to the people in front of you right now instead of waiting for the "real" life to start. You'd notice the weather. You'd be less interested in impressing people who don't matter and more curious about the ones who do. The sojourn framing cuts through the fiction that we'll finally relax and enjoy things once we've achieved the next milestone.

What makes this quote stick around isn't that it's shocking—it's ancient advice—but that we keep needing reminding. We keep forgetting that the destination was never the point.