The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long

You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and... See more

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that ... See more

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who ... organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day... Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man who is already full and satisfied food which ... See more

This, Seneca cautions, is tenfold more toxic for the soul when one is working for the man, as it were, and toiling away toward goals laid out by another:

Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another’s, and their

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