The Shortness of Life

The Shortness of Life written by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Stoic philosopher focuses on the non-renewability of our most important resource: our time. Anyone who wishes to live to their full potential and who want to know how to get back control of your life and live it to the fullest should understand and learn to use time effectively.

Here are the Top 5 takeaways from his essay Shortness of life.

1. Know Your Most Important Asset

 When it comes to money, people will guard it with all their means and spend cautiously, but when it comes to spending time, people are extravagant.

Does it make any sense to value anything above your only life? Certainly No. Yet we find ourselves trading our only life away to make others like us, to get money and be lazy, distracted and entertained.

The main reason that we waste so much of our time is because we forget that it is limited, that we are going to die.

Wasting time is the worst thing we can do to ourselves, but of course, there are many things and people that would take away our precious time. So always stay stingy when it comes to spending time.

Think twice before taking up any activity that will take a lot of time and be prepared to defend yourselves against unworthy pursuits.

Remember, you can always double your money easily but there is no way you can double your lifetime. Time is non-renewable; every minute you waste is gone forever.

2. Being busy always is not living

Humans are constantly preoccupied with something like chasing money, doing day-to-day work, chasing ambition and entertainment.

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied. Since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man.

In our habitual compulsion to ensure that the next moment contains what this one lacks, we manage to become “accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. However, the man who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day.

Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving food to a man who is already full and satisfied, which he does not want but can hold.

You must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.

Many are so busy they never slow down enough to find their true selves. We are never content and often replace one goal with another without a consistent purpose.

There are even burdens that come with abundance. Rich people are busy in trying to stay rich and in guarding their treasure.

Even success comes at a high price: if you want to be successful, be prepared for a life that rushes by, a life that is filled with obligations and a life without any entertainment.

Most only live a small part of their lives and spend most of it in trivial and unnecessary things.

3. Luxury & Leisure are not living

It is important to make room for leisure in life, but a life of pure leisure is considered meaningless. Such people are as good as dead. Purposeful living is required to truly live, as long as it is your own purpose, you should own and control it.

There is another type of excessive luxury that concerned with making a show of everything and being fancy. These people are “idly preoccupied” and thus wasting their only lives on vain pursuits.

They spend lot of time focussing on the appearance of their hair, beard, looks but they never spend any time thinking about what is their purpose in life.

There are endless other distractions all the time especially in modern times, where we invest a lot of life force in our presence on social media.

Remember our time is our only life, so imagine of the screen sucking your soul away while you use Twitter, Facebook, Insta or while you binge watch TV & web series.

Many of us are living what might as well be considered a life of mere existence: lazing around and wasting our potential.

Living is nothing but being in control of yourself and enjoying yourself meaningfully and working towards goals that are important to you. But most of us seem to live like a boat that has never left the harbour or we would be just journeying in endless circles at the same place until the boat sinks.

4. Reversing the clock

Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly.

No one will bring back the years lost; no one will restore you to yourself. It will not lengthen itself for a anyone’s command or a favor.

As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside.

What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.

So stop procrastinating. 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.

You must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow in the middle of a desert.

The preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.

5. How to Live With Duty and Purpose

Of all people only those who make time to study the past lessons and use it to improvise the present are the only ones really alive.

They not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own.

Unless we are very ungrateful, all those distinguished founders of holy creeds were born for us and prepared for us a way of life. By the toil of others we are led into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light.

From them you can take whatever you wish: it will not be their fault if you do not take your fill from them. What happiness, what a fine old age awaits the man who has made himself a client of these!

He will have friends whose advice he can ask on the most important or the most trivial matters, whom he can consult daily about himself, who will tell him the truth without insulting him and praise him without flattery, who will offer him a pattern on which to model himself.

So learn from great men of the past, use it to improve the present and pass it on to future generation for further improvement.

Summary:

The most important lesson of On the Shortness of Life of course is that we need to value our time and avoid wasting it at all costs. Sure, we understand this intellectually but how many of us can actually say they truly live?

There is no shortage of things that take away our time and we must guard against them. To live this lesson, practice saying “No!” to many of the time-wasting things that you do, like trying to impress people or staring at a screen.

Consider whether your potential actions are virtuous, will truly benefit you, and whether they are worthy of making up your only life. If not, commit to turning it down, even if it might cause others to be displeased with you.

The lessons from On the Shortness of Life urge us to take stock of how we have lived so far, and to count the time that has been truly lived, as opposed to filled with unworthy busyness and distractions.

What you can start doing today is to start reflecting on how you spend each and every day. To borrow from Seneca, his favourite time to journal was in the evenings. When darkness had fallen and his wife had gone asleep, he explained to a friend, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” Then he would go to bed, finding that “the sleep which follows this self-examination” was particularly sweet.

The final lesson we should take away from Seneca’s work is that we need to remember that we could die at any moment, and we have at most a few decades left to live. We should find a way to remind ourselves every day that we are going to die, perhaps by placing Sticky notes in places we will see every day. You might feel like you don’t forget that you’re going to die, but do you think about it on a regular basis? Does it inform your every decision-making? Most people can’t say yes to that, so we must do a little work to make sure we can.

So to Recap, here are the 5 takeaways from the Shortness of life by Seneca:

1. Know Your Most Important Asset
2. Being busy always is not living
3. Luxury & Leisure are not living
4. Reversing the clock
5. How to Live With Duty and Purpose

Do you agree with Seneca on these aspects? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.