How to have a life with Seneca

Part XXV of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series

[Based on How to Have a Life: An Ancient Guide to Using Our Time Wisely, by Seneca, translated by James S. Romm. Full book series here.]

Life is short, isn’t it? Well, it depends on how you measure its length, and on how you weigh the relative importance of quality and quantity. One of the best sources for reflections on this theme surely is Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae, On the Shortness of Life, newly translated by James S. Romm for the ongoing Princeton University Press series, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers.

I interviewed James on the subject of Seneca for The Philosophy Garden’s occasional “Meet the Greco-Romans” videocast, and it was a fascinating conversation about the man, the philosopher, and how the two related to each other.

James begins his introduction to this new handy booklet with some famous words uttered four decades ago by then Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas: “No one on his deathbed ever said, I wish I’d spent more time on my business.” Indeed. James then goes on to remind us that we engage in all sorts of somewhat strange thoughts about the shortness of our lives. We make “bucket lists,” a typical (and rather annoying, in my opinion) American approach to the problem of making sure we do things that matter. We also complain that our existence is too brief, even though modern science has extended average life span considerably. And we refer to the internet as a “time suck” while mindlessly spending hours and hours on it every day.

We are, in other words, a bit confused about the issue. Seneca here comes to the rescue, and James regales us not only with a crisp translation of De Brevitate Vitae, but also with excerpts from the first and forty-ninth letters Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius, which touch on the same theme.

Seneca is very critical of busy-ness for the sake of being busy, and he’s also not very friendly to the notion of business in the usual sense of the word, that is, activities aiming at gaining wealth. Despite being very wealthy himself—which for a Stoic is a so-called “preferred indifferent”—he doesn’t think that we will get to the end of our life and regard the time we allotted to accumulating money as having been well spent. And modern research in the psychology of happiness says he’s right.

Those who invest a lot of their time in hobbies and similar pursuits are also been wasteful, according to Seneca, and James rightly comments that De Brevitate Vitae at times becomes a biting (and, in my mind, welcome) piece of social satire. Indeed, Seneca mounts an all-out attack against Roman materialism and, by extension, against our own 21st century version of it. James writes: “Great wealth takes us out of ourselves and away from what’s real and true; it prevents us from being “masters of time,” an intriguing phrase found only [in this book by Seneca].”

Inevitably, whenever we talk about Seneca, the issue is raised about how well his own life measured up to his stated philosophy and ideals. I will leave the reader to consider James’s take in the Introduction to the book, and perhaps my own as articulated here.

It is interesting that De Brevitate Vitae was likely written in 55 CE, the first year of Nero’s reign, when Seneca was optimistic about the future of the Empire and his own ability to steer the young princeps in the right direction, aided by the able Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Sextus Afranius Burrus. Indeed, it was only when the latter died, seven years later, that things really started going south for Rome and for Seneca.

By contrast, the Moral Epistles addressed to Lucilius were composed later in Seneca’s life, when he was attempting (unsuccessfully) to use his wealth to buy his retirement from Nero’s court. And yet the issue of the shortness of life was still very much on Seneca’s mind, and we get another peek at it from the point of view of a more experienced and less optimistic man, one who was, as James puts it, sensing his own time quickly running out.

Seneca, part of a double herm featuring Socrates on the other side. Museum of the Ara Pacis, Rome. Photo by the Author.

Let’s take a closer look at the text by way of a few highlights, accompanied by brief commentaries:

“Most of humankind complains about the spitefulness of Nature, on grounds that we’re born for a short life span. … In fact, our time is not short, but we squander much of it. Life’s long enough and generously allotted to allow us to achieve great things, if it were well spent. … It’s like this: life’s not short when we get it, but we make it so; we’re not poor in life but wasteful of it.” (On the Shortness of Life, 1)

Some people get depressed when they are reminded that, say, Mozart died at age 35. Or that Einstein published four landmark papers in a single year, his annus mirabilis, in 1905. Meanwhile, what have they done with their life? But of course both Mozart and Einstein were actual geniuses, so that’s setting the bar a bit too high for most of us.

Still, the question is a good one: what have you been doing with your life, so far? What are you doing with it right now? What do you intend to do with it for the (unknown) remaining segment of it? These are good questions that we ought to ask ourselves, at least from time to time, in order to avoid getting on our deathbed, looking back, and thinking “that’s it?”

“No one lets their property get seized; if even a tiny dispute arises over boundaries, people dash for stones and weapons. Yet they allow others to invade their very life, or indeed they themselves install those who will carve off swaths of its territory. … Think of what you can claim to have done in so long a life; how many people have taken chunks of your life while you didn’t notice what you were losing; how much was lost to empty grief, to foolish elation, to greedy desire, to fawning socializing; how little a part of your time you still own; then you’ll understand that you’re in fact dying too soon.” (On the Shortness of Life, 3)

I love Seneca reminding us that “people dash for stones and weapons” as soon as their property is perceived to be threatened, and yet they don’t mind at all, indeed positively invite other people to take over that most precious resource: time. We don’t seem to appreciate that lost property can be replaced, and at any rate it only concerns things external to us. Lost time, by contrast, is very much our own, and once gone it cannot be replaced.

Notice what sorts of things Seneca, as a Stoic, says are wasteful of our time (and energy): grief, foolish elation (i.e., concerning things that are not actually important), greedy desire, and fawning socializing. I’ll come back to arguably the most problematic entry in this list, grief, in a moment. First let us note that all the others are accompanied by modifiers: elation can be justified, it is the foolish variety that is wasteful; desiring certain things is also okay, but not if such desire is greedy; and socializing is perfectly normal for a social animal like us, but not if it is done by fawning.

What about grief? Here Seneca’s attitude is more nuanced than that of other Stoics, like Epictetus. In Stoicism, grief is strictly speaking an unhealthy emotion, because it is contrary to reason. How so? Death is natural and ought therefore to be expected. The proper response is acceptance, not grief. Then again, Seneca wrote a number of letters of consolation, for instance to Marcia and to Polybius, in which he very clearly departs from Stoic orthodoxy and approaches a position that we find also in Cicero: grief is natural, but excessive grief is a form of self-indulgence. Notwithstanding my admiration for Epictetus, I think Seneca and Cicero are closer to the mark.

“It’s agreed by all that no subject can be well pursued by those whose attention is elsewhere, neither oratory nor the liberal arts, for the mind that’s pulled every which way takes in nothing very deeply but rejects all things as though they were forced upon it. … Living must be learned through a whole lifetime, and—you’ll perhaps marvel at this even more—dying, too, must be learned through a whole lifetime.” (On the Shortness of Life, 7)

Attention, both Seneca and Epictetus remind us, is crucial, for the simple reason that nothing has ever been improved by not paying attention to it. That’s why the word that Epictetus uses, prosoche, is sometimes translated as “mindfulness,” though its meaning is quite different from the one it has acquired in the Buddhist tradition (or even in the westernized version of the Buddhist tradition, as taught by Jon Kabat-Zinn). This is, of course, particularly relevant to a society like ours, where people are constantly distracted by social media, celebrities, and all sorts of other causes of wasted time.

It is by paying attention that we learn how to live, according to Seneca. Perhaps a bit more surprisingly, it is also how we learn how to die. He famously wrote that we die every day, meaning that dying is a process that, in a sense, begins the moment we are born. If we think of it that way, it becomes doubly important that we pay attention and that we ask ourselves what our priorities should be in order to make the best use of our time on Earth.

“Old age, a state they arrive at unprepared and unprotected, bears down on their still-childish minds. Before they know it, they’ve tumbled into it, for they didn’t perceive it creeping up day by day.” (On the Shortness of Life, 9)

Modern research in the psychology of old age confirms that Seneca’s warning was on target: many people are unprepared for the final stretch, even though of course they have known for years that it was coming. Anecdotally, I have had a number of close relatives going through that process, and in most cases it was not a pretty sight. It seems like many simply couldn’t believe it was happening to them, and they had not given any thought to what to do and how to cope.

I’m on the threshold of old age myself, at this point. Recently I went to visit my PhD advisor, now retired, and we were amused to discover that that weekend was the 34th anniversary of when he drove from the University of Connecticut to JFK airport to pick up this then 26 year-old guy from Italy who really wanted to study gene-environment interactions under his guidance. And now it is my turn to contemplate retirement in the not too distant future. Wow.

“The only people enjoying true leisure are those who make time for philosophy. Only they are truly alive. They not only attend to their own life span but add every age to their own. Whatever portion of time has passed before they came on the scene is annexed to their stretch of time. If we’re not terribly lacking in gratitude, those most illustrious founders of sanctified schools of thought were born for our sake; for us they fashioned a paradigm of true life. We are led by others’ efforts toward finer matters, things dragged out of the shadows and into the light. From no century are we barred; we’re admitted to all of them. … One can argue with Socrates, entertain doubts with Carneades, be at peace along with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, surpass it with the Cynics.” (On the Shortness of Life, 14)

The answer, of course, is philosophy. Not the academic variety—as interesting as it is, at least for me—but philosophy as a way of life, that love of wisdom that nudges us to obey the Delphic injunction, Γνῶθι σαυτόν (gnōthi sauton), know thyself.

This particular passage is one of my favorite from Seneca: he reminds us that any one can engage in conversation with the best minds of all times and all places. As he beautifully puts it, we can talk with Socrates, be skeptical with Carneades, pursue tranquillity of mind with Epicurus, strive to be the best humans we can be by following the Stoics and their philosophical cousins, the Cynics. And, of course, we can read Seneca himself and see what he has to say on topics ranging from the destructive nature of anger to how to properly give and receive, to how to face death.

Temple of Apollo at Delphi, photo by the Author.

“That’s what you should do, Lucilius; claim yourself for yourself, and hoard the time that up to now was pilfered or seized from you or that slid from your grasp. … Indeed, if you’re paying close attention, the greatest part of life slips past for those who fail to get things done, a large part for those who do nothing, and all of it for those who do something other than what they ought.” (Letter 1.1)

This, then, is the advice that Seneca gives to his friend Lucilius: to reclaim time for himself so that he doesn’t waste it like others regularly do. He then mentions specifically three ways in which people waste portions or even the whole of their lives:

(i) By failing to get things done, perhaps because they jump from one project to another or from one occupation to another, without ever focusing enough so that they can achieve something;

(ii) By doing nothing, or at least nothing of consequence, squandering their existence playing video games, arguing on social media, or pursuing careers for the sole purpose of making money or acquiring fame;

(iii) By not doing what we ought to do. And what is that? Here the Stoics are clear and in unanimous agreement, as we get the same message from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, among others: we ought to live in agreement with Nature, which—for a social species capable of reason like ours—means to use our large brains to solve problems while striving to live cooperatively and in harmony with other people.

“Time didn’t use to seem so fleeting to me. Now, its pace seems beyond belief, either because I sense the approach of the finish line or because I’ve started to recognize and count up what I’ve lost. That’s why I’m more outraged that some people spend most of this small stretch of time on empty pursuits—an amount of time that, even if it were very carefully guarded, can’t accommodate even what’s needed. Cicero says that even if his life span were doubled, he wouldn’t have enough time to read the lyric poets.” (Letter 49.4-5)

Cicero and Seneca are in agreement here: there are more important things in life than reading the lyric poets! That may be debatable, of course, but it is an interesting question to ask ourselves: what sort of things are not worth doing? Research on end-of-life regrets shows that people do not think their life would have been more meaningful if they had attended more meetings at work, or answered more emails, or spent more time on social media.

What, then, is important for a human being? Relationships and meaningful projects. It turns out that people wish they had spent more time with their family and friends, both topics that are important to the Stoics. As for what makes a project, activity, or even a profession meaningful, well, that again has to do with the social dimension of our lives: if it involves and helps out other people (I guess stamp collecting is out!).

It is well worth pondering all of the above, so that we may live to the fullest of our abilities, facing the final curtains with a sense that we’ve done our best knowing, as Marcus Aurelius says, that we have gone aboard, we have set sail, we have touched land, and it is now time to go ashore.

[Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV.]