11 ms·

Seneca on The Shortness of Time (2017)

296 points by prostoalex 7y ago

blinkingled 7y ago
Yet the best hours of my life have been idle, empty ones with no plans or agenda whatsoever. This whole idea of filling time with 'work' like it is a race is completely antithetical to any idea of joy and fulfilment. It feels like 'wasting' time or downtime is essential to meaningful productivity. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be. -- Peter Gibbons.
- lordleft 7y ago
  I would like to point out that Seneca was contemptuous of busyness for its own sake. The point is not to work, but to spend the finite time we are alive well. Maybe that includes periods of rest and repose. There is a tradition of meditation in Stoicism that invites us to take it easy and reflect on what we have, instead of hurrying to an arbitrary destination, given to us by our bosses, or society. From the same essay: 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 he does not want but can hold. So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
  - dorkwood 7y ago
    Which translation is that? It seems easier to read than my copy (Richard M. Gummere).
    - lordleft 7y ago
      I got the quote from this brainpickings article: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-life/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-short... ...which uses: https://www.amazon.com/Shortness-Life-Penguin-Great-Ideas/dp/0143036327/?tag=braipick-20 https://www.amazon.com/Shortness-Life-Penguin-Great-Ideas/dp...
- 1996 7y ago
  Coasting through life is still being part of the rat race - except you run at a lower pace. The core issue remains: if you don't have a plan for your life, society will make a plan for you. By making your own destiny, you may fill part of your time with work, but only as long as it serves your purpose. How good is your idea of wasting time to get meaningful productivity, if you are achieving someone else's goals instead of your own?
  - blinkingled 7y ago
    > How good is your idea of wasting time to get meaningful productivity, if you are achieving someone else's goals instead of your own? That's a great point actually - the someone else's goals part. The whole intelligence in service of madness thing stems from the fact that sane and intelligent people sometimes do not have a goal of their own. I definitely did not mean to imply that idling is the only thing you do with your life - on the contrary I was trying to say idling is a great way of knowing who you are and coming up with general goals for yourself that you can then fulfill in the rest of the time. The problem with busy life is you never really dream of your goals and are constantly looking for things to do - it makes it almost eventual that you'll be in service of others' goals. That's not always a bad thing but I find no fulfillment in doing just that.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      The whole intelligence in service of madness thing stems from the fact that sane and intelligent people sometimes do not have a goal of their own. I have a suspicion that the majority only have a vague idea and they mostly end up where they are by happenstance.
  - marnett 7y ago
    This is profound and concise. Particularly that society/someone/something will make a plan out of you if you are without one.
  - wruza 7y ago
    >The core issue remains: if you don't have a plan for your life, society will make a plan for you. You only plan to choose various plans society has for you. There is no plan that is viable out of society’s general direction, if you participate in any constructive way. Seneca, Socrates and many others were just a tip of the iceberg, and they quickly go underwater, when that iceberg decided to flip or crack. It is okay to achieve others goals if you get paid enough and do not have to constantly fight (iow carry huge risks) through your life. Their perspective is useful, in a way Jocko Willink motivation videos are useful, but you don’t really go to a full-blown war after watching these, nor are you ready for it.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I guess whatever you do, try to approach what pleases your mind to the fullest. Either coasting along looking at the sky or climbing a mountain. Slight anecdote, as a health improvement I started jogging in the woods last summer. My brain is still recovering from a lot of nasty sensations and I'm very sensitive to any form of happy emotions. Whenever I run, I'm free to pick my path, and this feels like a very raw form of happiness seeking. If a part of the forest appeals to me (because it's new, or the sun shines differently through it, or if it's more challenging) I do it and it appeases something in me.
- ellius 7y ago
  One thing not highlighted in this article is that Seneca considered "leisure" the highest virtue. He talks about Augustus, for example, and other prominent Romans who "won" the rat race, and says they basically wasted their lives. So I think you'd find Seneca's message agreeable. Just read the real thing and ignore this knockoff.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  There is a Brad Paisley song about this - Time Well Wasted. Like everything, the key is finding the right balance - between activity and rest, between production and consumption, between relationships and solitude. There is no easy answer to what the right ratios are, and they will vary by person and by the stage in life.
- polishdude20 7y ago
  I think you can still be idle and rest but the point is that you're mindful that you're doing it for a purpose and that time is important. Don't sit idle because you're forced to. Because you've got nothing better to do. Sit idle because you choose to. Because you believe it is important.
magwa101 7y ago
Seneca, JFC...
lordleft 7y ago
It was this essay, along with a choice quote from Epictetus, that induced me to finally leave my day job to go back to University to study CS. I graduated a month ago and began my first full-time SWE position last Monday. I spent my twenties on auto-pilot, allowing external circumstances to effectively decide my life for me. Seneca and the Stoics reminded me of the immense agency I still possessed, despite the obscenity that was the recession and the cost of American Higher Education. I still had some say over my life, or at least over my choices, and if I didn't exercise my agency, life would slip through my fingers and hurtle to me a deathbed filled with regret and disappointment. The quote from Epictetus: "How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates."
- natmaka 7y ago
  Character is destiny. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become. ― Heraclitus
  - lihaciudaniel 7y ago
    Everything is change, nothing is forever -- Heraclitus
- 7y ago
pmoriarty 7y ago
Seneca's Moral Letters[1] are also well worth reading, though they are as a whole more hit and miss than On the Shortness of Life which is excellent throughout. [1] - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
I didn't realize Seneca was still writing as of 2017
- golemotron 7y ago
  Entrepreneur too. His apple juice is incredible.
- dang 7y ago
  We'd change the year to that of his letter, but the bulk of the OP was not written by Seneca.
cryptozeus 7y ago
Letters by seneca (free) http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/three-huge-volumes-of-stoic-writings-by-seneca-now-free-online-thanks-to-tim-ferriss.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/three-huge-volumes-of-sto...
compumike 7y ago
On a related note, if you don't make conscious and deliberate decisions about how you want to spend your finite time -- i.e. if you are living "on autopilot" as another commenter said -- the decisions will be made for you by default, whether you like it or not. “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” ― Sylvia Plath
- mariushn 7y ago
  Wonderful quote! How do you get more figs in the tree? As in, how to discover possibilities you haven't thought of, and the tree has only 2-3 figs now, none amazing?
  - whtrbt 7y ago
    Wander, ramble, daydream, experiment.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    I think this could help. 1. The point is not to "do what you love", but to "love what you do". Trying to do what you love is destined to fail quickly: there's always something else, there's always a part of the job you don't like, and you never truly have control over the very fact that you love something or not, at least not if you approach it like that — you'd be condemned to follow your emotions as the only decision maker for your choices in life. But emotions are meant to guide us (it's information, just the language of the body), not control us. Loving what you do, however, is a totally different process, and quickly becomes a choice as you flex that muscle: essentially it's about putting "good will" into all your actions, it's about this idea that "how you do anything is how you do everything"; to sincerely try with an open mind and being positive about it. Several things follow from this simple practice, mindset: - we are creatures of habit, and the more we do something, usually the more we like it. It's just how the brain is wired — that's how marketing works, by sheer repetition, law of numbers. Propaganda and manipulation as well. "Self-programming" yourself to be able, in time, to grow positive feelings about anything you have to do is really a sort of superpower in this day and age. - Here's an equation: effort + love = mastery (alternatively, you may see grit + passion = skill, any variation like that). The message is clear: lots of effort (time, regularity, repetition) and lots of love (but that part comes from the doing, it's mechanical unless you resist it) is how we build ourselves, and happiness among other things follows from that (because nobody can take away such happiness from you, it's internal). - It seems that we all score differently on that scale, the term is conscientiousness, but it is my belief that it can be trained by force of will + action, i.e. determination (to commit to do it, whether you are "motivated" or not, regardless of emotions) + effort (marathon: paced, sustained, repetition, long-term). It takes about 20 days to break a habit, and 3 months to form a new one. Probably about a year to make it last virtually forever, unless detrained. These simple things have huge effects over the psyche (happiness notably) in the long run. Massive compound effects. 2. Another thing is the idea of "meaning", purpose, the "why" we do what we do. As far as I'm concerned, this matter is solved: you create meaning for yourself. That's it. We all make a patchwork from bits and pieces from all over the place, and it may appear of its own as a child or never for a lifetime, but ultimately, it's a conscious act, a decision you make. Meaning is the result of volition, internal drive to give substance to the world; those who seek it externally may be amazed at others but probably feel empty themselves until they become the creators of their own interpretation, their own meaning. Purpose is what you say it is. The short TL;DR is that if you picked up anything and worked diligently at it for 10 years, you'd come out the other side an expert and loving it (average/normal human response to that situation).
acabal 7y ago
Shameless plug, you can download a high quality ebook of his dialogues, including "On the Shortness of Life," for free at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-stewart https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-st...
867-5309 7y ago
"The very parent at the park playing on his iPhone while his children run around playing and laughing is the same one, who, when you fast-forward the axis of time, wants those precious moments back." other brands are available..
- atorodius 7y ago
  Antonomasia?
  - 867-5309 7y ago
    product placement? elite luxury?
dahart 7y ago
> The best way to spend money is to buy time I realized recently that I never fully understood ‘time is money’, never felt it first-hand truly and deeply, until I tried to start my own business. Then I ‘discovered’ that money directly extended the amount of time I could chase my dream and feed my family. Having a job never gave me the sense that I was buying time, maybe because it’s not finite in the same way the startup is.
agumonkey 7y ago
I was reminded that some things in adult life still distort the notion of time. Climbing for instance got people to quote "turns a second in a century". The amount of focus and depth for every little move makes your mind works differently. I think modern life kills this. Too many things are too comfortable and too stressful (as in short burst of opposite stimuli).
lihaciudaniel 7y ago
If you like to read more about Seneca, I can't recommend enough Tao Of Seneca [1] by Tim Ferris. Other classical text that are must read include Enchiridion by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius Meditations [1] https://tim.blog/2017/07/06/tao-of-seneca/ https://tim.blog/2017/07/06/tao-of-seneca/
rnd33 7y ago
One thing I can't shake, and it appears already in the second sentence of the quoted letters by Seneca: "Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested." What are "great things" and what is the definition of a "well-invested life"? Most of us will live rather unremarkable lives, most likely forgotten in a hundred years or so (at best!). Who says a "good life" means being remembered as long as possible by future humans? Who says the point of living is not to live in luxury and carelessness? It just seems to me that Seneca assumes the stoic world-view to be the norm. Can anyone help me understand?
- FooHentai 7y ago
  It's yours to define. If you consider it properly, and conclude that you would choose your life to be luxury and carelessness, then it makes sense to start steering things in that direction for yourself. Some folks find satisfaction in raising then next generation. Others want a statue of themselves somewhere that lasts for a few hundred years beyond their own life. Some folks create, others are satisfied with minimal impact. It's all personal, but considering it and then acting on it is the core idea. Otherwise time carries on regardless and you get to the end to look back over a pointless meandering. Which, if you consider that to be ok, is also fine.
lawlorino 7y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't find this kind of writing helpful? It just seems to add to my increasing anxiety about throwing my life away by reminding me of that fact but not presenting a path to solution. I think I can best summarise my problem from the quote > “A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.” The critical thing that I'm missing is how does one go about finding the value of their life exactly?
gbacon 7y ago
So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.

296 points by prostoalex 7y ago

Yet the best hours of my life have been idle, empty ones with no plans or agenda whatsoever. This whole idea of filling time with 'work' like it is a race is completely antithetical to any idea of joy and fulfilment. It feels like 'wasting' time or downtime is essential to meaningful productivity. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be. -- Peter Gibbons.

lordleft 7y ago
I would like to point out that Seneca was contemptuous of busyness for its own sake. The point is not to work, but to spend the finite time we are alive well. Maybe that includes periods of rest and repose. There is a tradition of meditation in Stoicism that invites us to take it easy and reflect on what we have, instead of hurrying to an arbitrary destination, given to us by our bosses, or society. From the same essay: 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 he does not want but can hold. So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
- dorkwood 7y ago
  Which translation is that? It seems easier to read than my copy (Richard M. Gummere).
  - lordleft 7y ago
    I got the quote from this brainpickings article: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-life/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-short... ...which uses: https://www.amazon.com/Shortness-Life-Penguin-Great-Ideas/dp/0143036327/?tag=braipick-20 https://www.amazon.com/Shortness-Life-Penguin-Great-Ideas/dp...
1996 7y ago
Coasting through life is still being part of the rat race - except you run at a lower pace. The core issue remains: if you don't have a plan for your life, society will make a plan for you. By making your own destiny, you may fill part of your time with work, but only as long as it serves your purpose. How good is your idea of wasting time to get meaningful productivity, if you are achieving someone else's goals instead of your own?
- blinkingled 7y ago
  > How good is your idea of wasting time to get meaningful productivity, if you are achieving someone else's goals instead of your own? That's a great point actually - the someone else's goals part. The whole intelligence in service of madness thing stems from the fact that sane and intelligent people sometimes do not have a goal of their own. I definitely did not mean to imply that idling is the only thing you do with your life - on the contrary I was trying to say idling is a great way of knowing who you are and coming up with general goals for yourself that you can then fulfill in the rest of the time. The problem with busy life is you never really dream of your goals and are constantly looking for things to do - it makes it almost eventual that you'll be in service of others' goals. That's not always a bad thing but I find no fulfillment in doing just that.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    The whole intelligence in service of madness thing stems from the fact that sane and intelligent people sometimes do not have a goal of their own. I have a suspicion that the majority only have a vague idea and they mostly end up where they are by happenstance.
- marnett 7y ago
  This is profound and concise. Particularly that society/someone/something will make a plan out of you if you are without one.
- wruza 7y ago
  >The core issue remains: if you don't have a plan for your life, society will make a plan for you. You only plan to choose various plans society has for you. There is no plan that is viable out of society’s general direction, if you participate in any constructive way. Seneca, Socrates and many others were just a tip of the iceberg, and they quickly go underwater, when that iceberg decided to flip or crack. It is okay to achieve others goals if you get paid enough and do not have to constantly fight (iow carry huge risks) through your life. Their perspective is useful, in a way Jocko Willink motivation videos are useful, but you don’t really go to a full-blown war after watching these, nor are you ready for it.
agumonkey 7y ago
I guess whatever you do, try to approach what pleases your mind to the fullest. Either coasting along looking at the sky or climbing a mountain. Slight anecdote, as a health improvement I started jogging in the woods last summer. My brain is still recovering from a lot of nasty sensations and I'm very sensitive to any form of happy emotions. Whenever I run, I'm free to pick my path, and this feels like a very raw form of happiness seeking. If a part of the forest appeals to me (because it's new, or the sun shines differently through it, or if it's more challenging) I do it and it appeases something in me.
ellius 7y ago
One thing not highlighted in this article is that Seneca considered "leisure" the highest virtue. He talks about Augustus, for example, and other prominent Romans who "won" the rat race, and says they basically wasted their lives. So I think you'd find Seneca's message agreeable. Just read the real thing and ignore this knockoff.
cortesoft 7y ago
There is a Brad Paisley song about this - Time Well Wasted. Like everything, the key is finding the right balance - between activity and rest, between production and consumption, between relationships and solitude. There is no easy answer to what the right ratios are, and they will vary by person and by the stage in life.
polishdude20 7y ago
I think you can still be idle and rest but the point is that you're mindful that you're doing it for a purpose and that time is important. Don't sit idle because you're forced to. Because you've got nothing better to do. Sit idle because you choose to. Because you believe it is important.

magwa101 7y ago

Seneca, JFC...

lordleft 7y ago

It was this essay, along with a choice quote from Epictetus, that induced me to finally leave my day job to go back to University to study CS. I graduated a month ago and began my first full-time SWE position last Monday. I spent my twenties on auto-pilot, allowing external circumstances to effectively decide my life for me. Seneca and the Stoics reminded me of the immense agency I still possessed, despite the obscenity that was the recession and the cost of American Higher Education. I still had some say over my life, or at least over my choices, and if I didn't exercise my agency, life would slip through my fingers and hurtle to me a deathbed filled with regret and disappointment. The quote from Epictetus: "How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates."

natmaka 7y ago
Character is destiny. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become. ― Heraclitus
- lihaciudaniel 7y ago
  Everything is change, nothing is forever -- Heraclitus
7y ago

pmoriarty 7y ago

Seneca's Moral Letters[1] are also well worth reading, though they are as a whole more hit and miss than On the Shortness of Life which is excellent throughout. [1] - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

I didn't realize Seneca was still writing as of 2017

golemotron 7y ago
Entrepreneur too. His apple juice is incredible.
dang 7y ago
We'd change the year to that of his letter, but the bulk of the OP was not written by Seneca.

cryptozeus 7y ago

Letters by seneca (free) http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/three-huge-volumes-of-stoic-writings-by-seneca-now-free-online-thanks-to-tim-ferriss.html http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/three-huge-volumes-of-sto...

compumike 7y ago

On a related note, if you don't make conscious and deliberate decisions about how you want to spend your finite time -- i.e. if you are living "on autopilot" as another commenter said -- the decisions will be made for you by default, whether you like it or not. “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” ― Sylvia Plath

mariushn 7y ago
Wonderful quote! How do you get more figs in the tree? As in, how to discover possibilities you haven't thought of, and the tree has only 2-3 figs now, none amazing?
- whtrbt 7y ago
  Wander, ramble, daydream, experiment.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  I think this could help. 1. The point is not to "do what you love", but to "love what you do". Trying to do what you love is destined to fail quickly: there's always something else, there's always a part of the job you don't like, and you never truly have control over the very fact that you love something or not, at least not if you approach it like that — you'd be condemned to follow your emotions as the only decision maker for your choices in life. But emotions are meant to guide us (it's information, just the language of the body), not control us. Loving what you do, however, is a totally different process, and quickly becomes a choice as you flex that muscle: essentially it's about putting "good will" into all your actions, it's about this idea that "how you do anything is how you do everything"; to sincerely try with an open mind and being positive about it. Several things follow from this simple practice, mindset: - we are creatures of habit, and the more we do something, usually the more we like it. It's just how the brain is wired — that's how marketing works, by sheer repetition, law of numbers. Propaganda and manipulation as well. "Self-programming" yourself to be able, in time, to grow positive feelings about anything you have to do is really a sort of superpower in this day and age. - Here's an equation: effort + love = mastery (alternatively, you may see grit + passion = skill, any variation like that). The message is clear: lots of effort (time, regularity, repetition) and lots of love (but that part comes from the doing, it's mechanical unless you resist it) is how we build ourselves, and happiness among other things follows from that (because nobody can take away such happiness from you, it's internal). - It seems that we all score differently on that scale, the term is conscientiousness, but it is my belief that it can be trained by force of will + action, i.e. determination (to commit to do it, whether you are "motivated" or not, regardless of emotions) + effort (marathon: paced, sustained, repetition, long-term). It takes about 20 days to break a habit, and 3 months to form a new one. Probably about a year to make it last virtually forever, unless detrained. These simple things have huge effects over the psyche (happiness notably) in the long run. Massive compound effects. 2. Another thing is the idea of "meaning", purpose, the "why" we do what we do. As far as I'm concerned, this matter is solved: you create meaning for yourself. That's it. We all make a patchwork from bits and pieces from all over the place, and it may appear of its own as a child or never for a lifetime, but ultimately, it's a conscious act, a decision you make. Meaning is the result of volition, internal drive to give substance to the world; those who seek it externally may be amazed at others but probably feel empty themselves until they become the creators of their own interpretation, their own meaning. Purpose is what you say it is. The short TL;DR is that if you picked up anything and worked diligently at it for 10 years, you'd come out the other side an expert and loving it (average/normal human response to that situation).

acabal 7y ago

Shameless plug, you can download a high quality ebook of his dialogues, including "On the Shortness of Life," for free at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-stewart https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-st...

867-5309 7y ago

"The very parent at the park playing on his iPhone while his children run around playing and laughing is the same one, who, when you fast-forward the axis of time, wants those precious moments back." other brands are available..

atorodius 7y ago
Antonomasia?
- 867-5309 7y ago
  product placement? elite luxury?

dahart 7y ago

> The best way to spend money is to buy time I realized recently that I never fully understood ‘time is money’, never felt it first-hand truly and deeply, until I tried to start my own business. Then I ‘discovered’ that money directly extended the amount of time I could chase my dream and feed my family. Having a job never gave me the sense that I was buying time, maybe because it’s not finite in the same way the startup is.

agumonkey 7y ago

I was reminded that some things in adult life still distort the notion of time. Climbing for instance got people to quote "turns a second in a century". The amount of focus and depth for every little move makes your mind works differently. I think modern life kills this. Too many things are too comfortable and too stressful (as in short burst of opposite stimuli).

lihaciudaniel 7y ago

If you like to read more about Seneca, I can't recommend enough Tao Of Seneca [1] by Tim Ferris. Other classical text that are must read include Enchiridion by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius Meditations [1] https://tim.blog/2017/07/06/tao-of-seneca/ https://tim.blog/2017/07/06/tao-of-seneca/

rnd33 7y ago

One thing I can't shake, and it appears already in the second sentence of the quoted letters by Seneca: "Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested." What are "great things" and what is the definition of a "well-invested life"? Most of us will live rather unremarkable lives, most likely forgotten in a hundred years or so (at best!). Who says a "good life" means being remembered as long as possible by future humans? Who says the point of living is not to live in luxury and carelessness? It just seems to me that Seneca assumes the stoic world-view to be the norm. Can anyone help me understand?

FooHentai 7y ago
It's yours to define. If you consider it properly, and conclude that you would choose your life to be luxury and carelessness, then it makes sense to start steering things in that direction for yourself. Some folks find satisfaction in raising then next generation. Others want a statue of themselves somewhere that lasts for a few hundred years beyond their own life. Some folks create, others are satisfied with minimal impact. It's all personal, but considering it and then acting on it is the core idea. Otherwise time carries on regardless and you get to the end to look back over a pointless meandering. Which, if you consider that to be ok, is also fine.

lawlorino 7y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't find this kind of writing helpful? It just seems to add to my increasing anxiety about throwing my life away by reminding me of that fact but not presenting a path to solution. I think I can best summarise my problem from the quote > “A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.” The critical thing that I'm missing is how does one go about finding the value of their life exactly?

gbacon 7y ago

So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.