LOSING TIME
Seneca encourages Lucilius not to fall into a similar trap of wasting his time, and to value every hour, for time alone belongs to us. Strangely, he points out, while people often prize external things, which have little real value, they frequently don’t value the most precious thing that is truly their own: the limited time that makes up our lives.
While Seneca’s first letter on the value of time is short, the importance of time—and the importance of not wasting our lives on meaningless pursuits—is a central theme running through all of his writings. It’s also a unique contribution he made to Stoic philosophy, because other Stoics didn’t discuss this topic. Significantly, when Seneca was much younger and at the height of his professional career, he wrote a little book, On the Shortness of Life, also about making the best use of time. It might even have been written when he was at his busiest, helping to run the Roman Empire, when Nero was still a teenager.
“Life, if you know how to use it, is long,” Seneca writes. “It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in sufficient measure to accomplishing even the greatest things, if our life is well invested. But when life melts away through carelessness and the pursuit of luxury, and when death finally presses down on us, we realize that life passed us by before we even knew it was passing.”4
According to Seneca, people fritter their lives away in countless ways: some through limitless greed, others through the pursuit of “useless undertakings.” Some through drunkenness, others through idleness. Some through political ambition, others through pursuing international trade. “Some are worn out by the self-inflicted slavery of serving the great.” Others waste their time “pursuing the wealth of others or complaining about their own.” Some lose their time by having no consistent goal, and throw themselves from one project to another, with no rhyme or reason. “Some have no goal by which to guide their course, and death takes them by surprise as they lie wilting and yawning.”5 While people tend to be very careful in guarding their physical property and financial savings, he says that when it comes to protecting their most valuable asset, many let it slip away.
THE CULT OF BUSYNESS, ANCIENT AND MODERN
Seneca is quite dubious about people who engage in constant “busyness,” running around as if they have many important tasks to do, while accomplishing little of significance in the process. Sometimes, the way people communicate their busyness seems little more than a form of show. In his words, “Loving to rush around is not proof someone is hardworking—it’s only the restlessness of an agitated mind.”6 Unlike work accomplished with real mental focus, acting like you’re busy is a waste of time.
As Seneca noted, some people “believe that busyness is proof of their success,” while a person with more character won’t “be busy for the sake of being busy.”7 Seneca, of course, was no slouch. He saw hard work as being essential. But he certainly would have questioned the wisdom of “multitasking.” He also would have questioned the value of participating in long, tiresome workplace meetings, in which nothing meaningful is accomplished. As we can see from Seneca’s writings, these kinds of things existed in his time, too; and as in our own time, they caused people to lose sense of the things that really matter in life.
In one graphic passage, which is also satirical, Seneca wrote, “We must cut down on the rushing around that many people engage in, wandering through theaters, houses, and marketplaces.” These people “intrude in other people’s affairs and always appear to be busy. But if you ask one of them leaving his house, “Where are you going? What are you planning to do?” he will reply: By Hercules! I do not know! But I’ll see some people and I’ll do something.” For Seneca, having some kind of definite aim in life was important, so he notes, “They wander around without purpose, seeking business, and don’t pursue what they intended to do but only what they stumble upon.” He finally ends with this humorous jab: “Their wandering is aimless and without point, like ants crawling over bushes, up to the highest tip of a branch and then all the way back down.”8
If Seneca wrote On the Shortness of Life toward the peak of his career, he would have been at the peak of his busyness too. Most likely he was thinking about a better way to live. He might have been wondering about how the lives of those around him, and perhaps his own life, had gotten so out of harmony with what he believed to be a fulfilling lifestyle.
The problem with busyness for Seneca is that it leads to mental preoccupation with trivial concerns. And when we become one of “the preoccupied,” as he calls them, we’re not able to focus our minds on anything more important than the tasks and checklists we’re trying to keep up with. I’m quite sure that we’ve all been in a place like that at one time or another—I certainly have—and most of us need to work for financial survival, too, as did Seneca. The big question, then, is: How can we value our time and live fully in the present moment without becoming overwhelmed with trivial tasks and distractions? How can we avoid losing our inner selves in a flurry of busyness?
One crucial idea for Seneca is that we shouldn’t postpone living now in the hope that we will one day be able to retire and live the life we always dreamed of. Far too many people try that approach and fail. Sometimes people die before they can retire. In other cases, because they have spent their entire lives working at a career, some people have never developed any outside interests they could pursue during retirement. Due to a lack of interests outside of work, some find retirement to be boring, or even die soon after leaving a lifelong position. In Seneca’s time, things were no different. As he notes,
You’ll hear many say: “After my fiftieth year, I’ll retire into leisure. And after my sixtieth year, I’ll give up all public duties.” But what guarantee do you have, I ask, that your life will last longer? Who will allow your plans to proceed just as you desire? Aren’t you ashamed just to save for yourself the little that remains of life and to develop your mind using only the time that can’t be spent on business? How late it is to begin living just when life must end!9
While Seneca valued hard work, leisure is essential, too: he certainly would have agreed with the idea that we should work to live, not live to work. Also, if possible, we should seek out meaningful work, which can contribute to society.
For Seneca, we should attend to our essential tasks when working, but avoid trivial things. This will eliminate much of the inconsequential “busyness” he described; and when our necessary tasks are complete, we should rest and apply our minds to better things.