The Shortness of Life - Yet we are wasting it. Seneca was right!
It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
Seneca said this over 2,000 years ago in his spectacular treatise ‘On the Shortness of Life.’ With what we know about life 2000 years ago. It wasn’t as wasteful as it is now, there were no zoom calls to attend, no social media pages to make you insecure, no Netflix to binge watch and no YouTube to sink countless hours in prison known as ‘Related Videos.’ So, in today’s world, it is even more important to value your time and make sure you’re spending it on activities that make your life more productive.
People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
It feels surreal thinking that Seneca wrote this 2,000 years ago, and today we see it so clearly, people waste so much time, which is their most valuable resource. It is genuinely non-renewable. We guard everything else, most of which is renewable, we can always earn more money, always do that task, and always complete that project, but what we can never get back is our time. Yet we are so wasteful of it.
I remember a time when I just used to drive endlessly on roads, spend hours in cafes, and watching Netflix and YouTube endlessly. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in for having a good time, taking time out for entertainment, and blowing some steam. The problem is finding the right balance. I still watch Netflix, I still get caught up in the ‘Related Videos’ loop in YouTube but all that after a day well spent doing things I should be doing to move my life forward and ensure I have a better life for myself and my family.
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 it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
We all look at our heroes and their achievements and ask ourselves, how did they do all that? It’s not like they have 48 hours in a day, yet they seem to achieve so much more. Ask any of them, and one thing they will tell you is that they say No more than they say Yes. Why? Because they value their time more than anything. They make sure they spend their time only on activities that move them closer to their goals. You won’t find any of them wasting hours on Netflix or YouTube; instead, they are doing things that matter. This isn’t just true for our time; even going back to Seneca’s time and reading about successful people throughout the ages, you’ll find that they weren’t wasting their time. When I talk about success, I don’t mean just work; I mean anything that you aspire to do. Writing for me was something I always wanted to do, I always wanted to write a book, I always wanted to speak my mind through words. I just never found the ‘time’ to do it. I always put it off, like many other of my aspirations. Precisely doing what Seneca say’s is the most significant waste of life. Putting things off for tomorrow as if we control it.
Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
I used to worry, ALOT! I would always overthink stuff. I always thought that being prepared meant I needed to have each angle covered. Then one of my mentors asked me, will someone get killed if you don’t think (read: overthink) of all these angles? I said no. His expressions gave me the reply. Not that I stopped at that point, but I slowly realized that I was overthinking things that aren’t in my control. They are in Fortune’s control, how Seneca calls it. I have consciously decided to live more immediately. To not overthink. It’s a battle worth fighting, and my life has improved for the better.
I am always surprised to see some people demanding the time of others and meeting a most obliging response. Both sides have in view the reason for which the time is asked and neither regards the time itself — as if nothing there is being asked for and nothing given. They are trifling with life’s most precious commodity, being deceived because it is an intangible thing, not open to inspection and therefore reckoned very cheap — in fact, almost without any value.
One of the most important things I’ve learned (the hard way) and have been trying to improve is choosing who and when to spend time with other people. Giving complete control to others over your time is a sure-fire way of losing control over your own life. Professional commitments at work, co-worker needs help, family needs to do something, friends want to hang out, and 100 other items. Allowing others unchecked control over your time can make things overwhelming and cause you to miss out on doing things you want. Maintain relationships, cherish your family and friends, BUT don’t give them control over your time. Chose when/why/who you want to meet. It’s your time, and you should choose wisely. You are giving them one of the only non-renewable and most precious commodity you have your time. So make it worth the cost. If there is the slightest chance that the person wanting your time is toxic, run away. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way, but the easiest way to get your life sucked out of you is in any type of toxic relationship.
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.
Throughout the book, Seneca refers to the end of life, he keeps referencing death. As death is one of those realities that we see every day around us, yet we fail to acknowledge that one day we would wake up, and that day would be our last. It’s such a depressing feeling that we have completely blocked it from our minds and thoughts. We never think about it.
It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor …… Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.
Thinking about the shortness of life and the approaching of death allows us to truly understand how much of life we are wasting, and are we doing what we really want to do? We shouldn’t get depressed thinking about something that will without an iota of doubt happen. We should prepare ourselves, live our lives, so we are ready to leave on a high note.
Here I’d like to quote a Hadith from the Holy Prophet (PBUH) about remembering death because that’s the destroyer of pleasures. That how you remember that one day it would be your last day here. So whatever you aspire to do, whatever you wish to do, do it now. Like every day, you’re inching towards death. He (PBUH) so rightly says death is the destroyer of pleasure.
“The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: ‘Frequently remember the destroyer of pleasures,’ meaning death.”
Ibn Majah – Hadith 4258
I’m usually not this depressing if the 2 people reading this blog found this post sad. I’m sorry about that, I just found some of my notes from this book and decided to write about it. With all going on in the world, it’s high time we think about our lives and how we live them. We all have several changes to make in our lives, we shouldn’t wait any longer to make them.