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- April 2017
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Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher and adviser to Nero, wrote this as a long letter to his friend Paulinus, who managed Rome’s grain supply. His point is that people complain life is too short, when the real problem is how much of it they give away: to busywork, to other people’s demands, to chasing status and money, and to putting off living until some later day that may never come. People guard their property carefully but hand out their time freely, as if they had an endless supply. The answer, for Seneca, is to treat time as your most valuable possession, stop postponing what matters, and spend more of it on reflection and learning from the best minds of the past. It’s short enough to read in an afternoon.
Highlights
The problem, Paulinus, is not that we have a short life, but that we waste time.
Thus the time we are given is not brief, but we make it so.
In protecting their wealth men are tight-fisted, but when it comes to the matter of time, in the case of the one thing in which it is wise to be parsimonious, they are actually generous to a fault.
You live as if you will live forever, no care for your mortality ever enters your head, you pay no mind to how much time has already gone by. You waste time as if it was a limitless resource, when any moment you spend on someone else or some matter is potentially your last.
You possess a fear that is all too human but have the boundless desires of a god. You will hear many men say: “When I’m fifty I’ll slow down; when I’m sixty, I’ll be ready for retirement.” But what guarantee, pray, do you have that your life will last longer?
It is too late to begin living life just as it is ending! What stubborn denial of mortality to delay dreams to after your fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to plan on starting your life at a point that not everyone gets to.
The busy man is busy with everything except living; there is nothing that is more difficult to learn how to do right.
We all rush through life torn between a desire for the future and a weariness of the present. But he who devotes his time to his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears for tomorrow.
A grey-haired wrinkled man has not necessarily lived long. More accurately, he has existed long.
Men are frivolous with the most valuable thing in the world, blind to its value because it is intangible, because it can not be seen, and for this reason it is considered a very cheap thing – even of almost no value at all.
But if each man could see the number of
years he has left ahead, just as he can see the years he has behind him, how disturbed those would be who saw only a few left, how careful they would be with them!
Is there anything more ridiculous than a person talking with certitude about the future? Such people devote their energy on creating a better life for themselves – spending their life preparing for life!
The greatest obstacle to living a full life is having expectations, delaying gratification based on what might happen tomorrow which squanders today.
“Why do you wait,” asks he. “Why are you idle? If you don’t seize the day, it escapes.”
you must compete with time’s haste in the speed of using
Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain.
The busy lose perspective because they are too distracted to stop and look back at the past, and if they did, there is no joy in recalling something that they must regard with regret.
The only really leisured people are those who devote time to acquiring true knowledge rather than trivia.