On the Shortness of Life

Life is only short to those who waste it. There are two ways in which time is wasted: by our squandering and by other people or preoccupations taking up our precious time.

It amazed Seneca that people were frugal with their personal property and money, but not with the thing they should be most stingy with: their time.

“Men do not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms,” Seneca wrote, but “allow others to encroach on their lives — why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives.”

It’s true, the one thing that is most finite to all of us is time. Money and property can increase and decrease depending on luck or effort, our time is fixed. Whatsmore, our lifespan is unknown to us.

Imagine if your only income was one gold coin dispensed every 24 hours from a machine. The machine held a limited amount of gold coins but you didn’t know how many. How would you treat those coins?

You’d cherish them, invest them wisely. Well, those are days: we get one every 24 hours and we have no idea how many are left. Why do we squander so many hours to laziness, or give them away so easily?

This can only lead to regret. “We are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realise that it has passed away before we knew it was passing,” Seneca wrote.

The two dangers are spending too much time in indulgence (“soaked with wine”) or dedication to useless tasks.

Careerists should take note that they will fare no better than the lazy when time creeps up on them. To be worn out by “political ambition” or “hope of profit” is no better than being lazy, since careers are “at the mercy of others”.

The successful politician should not be envied, because their success has come at the “cost of life.” All the labours of the careerist (including crawling through a “thousand indignities”) are only for the “sake of an epitaph.”

Fickleness in our goals, shifting focus and priority leads to dissatisfaction. The same can be said for those who have no control over their desires, and those who allow themselves to be depended upon by too many others. Popularity may be nice but social obligations will pull you in different directions and fritter your life away.

Planning may be a good idea, but there are also those who excessively plan, those who “spend their lives organising their lives.” Expectancy “hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in fortune’s control and abandoning what lies in yours.”

Time as a Commodity

For people who fall into these traps, Seneca makes the point that “life” is but a small part of what they really live, the rest is “just time.” Seneca makes the distinction between living and merely existing.

White hair and wrinkles is a sign of a long existence, not necessarily a long life. The sailor that sea storms has driven in circles has not been on a long voyage, just a long time tossing about.

“Life” is good use of time: a commodity to be guarded.

It is perhaps because he is writing to the praefectus annonae (“Prefect of the Provisions”) — the man who controlled the grain supply into the city of Rome — that Seneca writes of time as a commodity. Seneca draws allusions between the management of time and the management of grain.

“Time,” the philosopher wrote, “is not open to inspection” in the same way a commodity like grain is, “and therefore reckoned to be cheap.”

Seneca writes of preoccupied people who are in ill company with themselves, who waste time on trivia and pointless knowledge, obsessive hobbies and collecting or people who just “cook themselves in the sun.” Death creeps up on time wasters, people who assume time is cheap.

Slowing Time

But time is also relative. Seneca enlightens us to a number of ways that time can be condensed or slowed down to our benefit. “Wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.”

We accumulate knowledge over time, but books allow us to accumulate the time the writers have given us. Think of books as condensed time.

Distilled and compressed in the pages of books are years, decades and even centuries of knowledge and wisdom. If you read a good book, you are concentrating the time you have.

“Of all people only those are at leisure who make the time for philosophy, only those that are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that passed before them is added to their own.”

To make his point, Seneca likened reading the philosophers to paying them a visit. A book is always happy to receive a visitor. “None of [the great philosophers] will be too busy to see you,” he wrote. “They are at home to all mortals night and day.”