We often complain that there isn't enough time. Tasks to complete, places to be, expectations to meet, responsibilities waiting to be fulfilled… As the days follow one another, we rarely notice how quickly life is passing. Then, one day, we look back and encounter a curious truth: We have been busy all this time, but how much of it have we actually lived for ourselves?
Stoicism is a school of philosophy that emerged in ancient Greece in the 3rd century BCE, during the Hellenistic period. Rather than grounding human happiness in external circumstances, wealth or social status, it places reason, virtue and the ability to govern one's own thoughts and actions at the centre of a good life. According to the Stoics, we cannot control every circumstance, but we can examine our responses to events and the decisions we make. Seneca, one of the major Stoic philosophers of the Roman era, explores this approach through our relationship with time in his work On the Shortness of Life, written nearly two thousand years ago.
According to Seneca, human life is not as short as we imagine. The real problem lies in how we use the time we have. People complain about the brevity of life while spending their years pursuing wealth, status, reputation and other people's affairs. In trying to acquire everything they believe they need in order to live, they postpone living itself.
The person Seneca criticises is not simply someone who works too much or has too many daily responsibilities. He describes people who spend their lives pursuing other goals, leaving almost no time for themselves. Some become consumed by political struggles, others by the pursuit of wealth, while others lose themselves in the affairs of those around them. Everyone has something to occupy their time, yet they have no time left to reflect on their own lives.
This picture is hardly unfamiliar today. Being busy has almost become a measure of personal worth. We assign importance to ourselves according to how much we work, how many tasks we manage at once, how quickly we respond and how much we can accomplish. Even when we have free time, we look for something to fill it. We think about unfinished tasks while resting and sometimes feel that the time we spend on ourselves is being wasted.
Of course, working, creating and taking responsibility are natural parts of life. Seneca's objection is not to these things, but to giving our entire lives over to them. Everything a person does throughout the day may be necessary. But does everything that is necessary necessarily belong to the life we want to live?
One of the significant ways Seneca believes we lose our time is by handing it over to others. Making decisions according to other people's expectations, placing their priorities above our own, pushing aside our wishes in the pursuit of acceptance or recognition…
Over time, these behaviours can become so familiar that we lose the ability to distinguish where our own lives begin and where the demands of others take over. Eventually, instead of thinking about what we want, we begin to live according to what is expected of us.
And this does not always happen because we have no choice. Sometimes it is our need for approval, sometimes the fear of disappointing others, and sometimes habits we have never thought to question that keep us in the same place. A person's life is consumed not only by the things they do, but also by the decisions they never make on their own behalf.
Seneca argues that we can also miss our lives by becoming trapped in the past or constantly waiting for the future. We cannot change what has happened, and we cannot fully control what the future will bring. Yet we devote a considerable part of our minds to these two periods of time. We wish we had acted differently in the past and wait for better circumstances to arrive in the future.
When things improve, when work becomes less demanding, when we have enough money, when our responsibilities become lighter… In short, when we finally decide that the conditions are right for living.
It would be misleading to reduce Seneca's thought to the familiar modern advice to live in the moment. His concern is not simply to enjoy every moment or make the most efficient use of time. What he questions is our tendency to keep postponing our own lives until circumstances change or another time arrives. While we wait for the right conditions, the only time we truly have slips away unnoticed.
Another subject Seneca emphasises is the time we devote to philosophy and wisdom. He believes that those who engage with the works of thinkers who came before them and explore their ideas are not confined to the limits of their own lifetimes. They become part of a much greater intellectual inheritance, drawing on the thoughts and experiences of people who lived long before them.
For Seneca, philosophy is not an escape from everyday life or an exercise in abstract thinking alone. It is a way of examining our desires, fears, choices and priorities. Learning what others have thought is important, but so is questioning the foundations of our own beliefs.
Making good use of time, therefore, does not mean filling every minute with an activity. Losing ourselves in a book, following the thread of an idea, allowing a conversation to unfold without rushing, or simply creating time that belongs to us are also part of living. None of these things needs to produce a profit or a measurable result.
The thought Seneca expressed two thousand years ago still stands before us. We cannot determine how long our lives will be, but we can reflect on the purposes, people and pursuits to which we give our time. Perhaps the real question is not how much time we have left, but how we have spent the time that has already passed.
We do not know how much of our lives remains. But how much of the life we have lived so far have we truly lived for ourselves?
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