As Seneca repeatedly stresses over a dozen times in different writings, it’s the quality of one’s life that matters, not its quantity or its length. In my favorite description of this, he says life is like a play: it’s not the length of the play that matters, but the quality of the performance.16
For Seneca, obtaining a virtuous character is what matters in life, not life’s duration. To achieve the happy life is to live fully, regardless of its length. By contrast, he points out, many elderly people have simply “existed” for a long time but never truly lived. Some people, unfortunately, end up dying before they have even started to live fully.
Seneca gives an example of this. He’s writing to Lucilius about a mutual friend of theirs, a philosopher named Metronax, who died quite young, in the prime of his life. But while Metronax died young, he had developed a very fine character. Someone might complain that Metronax died in his prime. But Seneca responds:
He carried out the duties of a good citizen, a good friend, and a good son. He didn’t fall short in any respect. While his lifetime was incomplete, his life itself was perfect. Another man might seem to live for eighty years but only be around for eighty years—unless by “live” you mean that way in which trees are said to live. I beg you, Lucilius: Let’s carry on in this way, so our lives are measured like the most precious objects—not by their size, but by their worth. Let’s measure our lives by their performance, not by their duration.17
In the end, for Seneca, it’s the quality of a person’s life that allows someone to live fully, not its length.
THE BLESSINGS AND DANGERS OF OLD AGE
Our good is not merely in living, but in living well. Accordingly, a wise person will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. . . . He always reflects concerning the quality and not the quantity of his life.
—Seneca, Letters 70.4
No one knows how long he or she might live; it’s entirely beyond our control. That said, given the significant increases that have taken place in medicine and technology, the chance of someone reaching a ripe old age today, even into their nineties, has increased dramatically since Seneca’s time. But with extreme old age come difficulties, like the crumbling stones of Seneca’s country villa. At a certain point, an increasingly ancient structure will just collapse, bit by bit. This applies to aging bodies, too.
For Seneca, old age can be a blessing, and it can be one of the most enjoyable times of life. As he writes,
Let us embrace and love old age. It is full of pleasure if you know how to experience it. Fruits are sweetest when ripe, just before they spoil. Boyhood’s charm is greatest at its end. For those devoted to wine, it’s the very last drink that delights—the one that puts you under, delivering the final push to inebriation. Every pleasure delays its sweetest moments for last. The most pleasurable time of life is on its downhill slope, but before going over the edge. Even the time spent standing on the outermost edge can have its own pleasures, I believe.18
Seneca thought that old age was something to treasure and that old age can be one of the happiest times of life. But there reaches a point where, if you live long enough, a person’s life resembles “a lingering death.” Perhaps because of their own fear of death, some people believe that life should be preserved at any cost, under any conditions, even if that means keeping a loved one alive unconscious, on a machine, with no hope of recovery. As you might have guessed, Seneca would not have gone along with this approach. He wrote, “What kind of life is a lingering death? Can anyone be found who wishes to waste away amid pains, dying limb by limb, and losing his breath drop by drop, rather than breathing out his last once and for all?”19
As Seneca repeatedly noted, “What matters is not how long you live, but how nobly you live,”20 and being left alone in a hospital room, falling apart limb by limb, is not the noblest way to depart this world. Seneca’s philosophy, therefore, has significant implications today for thinking about end-of-life issues.
Both the Greek and the Roman Stoics allowed for suicide under very extreme conditions, which were much more likely to exist in the ancient world than they are today. But suicide aside, there’s no question that Seneca would strongly advocate for euthanasia, or having a “good death,” rather than living on for years in an incapacitated state. As he writes, “Few have passed through extreme old age to death without impairment, and many have lain inert, unable to use their bodies. In this case, the cruelest loss in life is the loss of the right to end it.”21
Seneca didn’t think that old age was something one should yearn for, but he didn’t think it was something one should reject, either. In the end, since every life is different, it could be a blessing or a hindrance. As he wrote, “It’s pleasant to be with yourself as long as possible—if you’ve made yourself into someone worth spending time with.”22
Despite that, there was a definite point where Seneca said he would personally draw the line. As he wrote to Lucilius,
I will not abandon old age as long as it preserves my whole self, by which I mean the whole of my better part. But if it begins to shatter my mind and destroy parts of it—if I can no long live, but only breathe—then I will jump free from that crumbling and collapsing edifice.23
That makes perfect sense because, for a Stoic, merely being able to keep on breathing without having one’s mental faculties—being able to think, to know, and to appreciate—wouldn’t be living at all.
LIVING EACH DAY AS IF IT’S YOUR LAST
I am aiming to live each day as if it is a complete lifetime.
—Seneca, Letters 61.1
Everyone has heard the saying, “Live one day at a time.” Whether or not that saying goes back to Seneca, it certainly goes back to him in spirit.
As Seneca repeatedly points out, people become anxious by worrying about the future. But that’s because they haven’t yet “found themselves” enough to fully live in, and to deeply enjoy, the present moment.
Seneca suggests that we should live each day as “a complete life,” as if it’s our last day of being alive. For Seneca, this idea becomes a brilliant inner practice that ties together many different themes in his work: the fullness of the happy life, the importance of living in the present moment, memento mori, and freeing ourselves from all anxiety, including the fear of death.
As Steve Jobs once said in a speech to college students,
When I was seventeen, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.24
Sadly, we’ll never know whether a quotation from Seneca ultimately inspired this daily meditation as practiced by Steve Jobs. But regardless of that, it’s undoubtedly a good practice. As a daily meditation, it encourages a person to reflect on his or her life as a whole, including the quality of one’s life at that very moment.