Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living

CHAPTER 2

Value Your Time: Don’t Postpone Living

Combining all times into one makes life long.

—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 15.5

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL, SUNNY FALL MORNING, WITH A slight chill in the air, and I’ve picked up a warm filter coffee to go. Now seated in my favorite restaurant, I’m ready to order a delicious breakfast. But I’m feeling especially happy this morning, as if a joyful reunion is about to take place. It’s because I’m going to spend some time with my old friend Seneca, but on a special occasion. For on this brisk but sunny morning, just as the world is coming alive and people are rushing off to work, I’m starting another reading of Seneca’s Letters, starting with the very first one.

This first letter, which is less than two pages long, is a warning about how people undervalue their time, written in a dazzling literary style. While Seneca didn’t give his letters titles, this one has been titled “On Saving Time,” or “Taking Charge of Your Time,” by different translators.

OUR MOST VALUABLE POSSESSION

Seneca believed that time is our most valuable possession. Because our lives are finite, each person has only a limited amount of time remaining. Many people, however, and for whatever reason, don’t value their time and waste their lives on meaningless pursuits. Then, as they reach the end of their lives, they finally realize the mistake they’ve made and experience a deep sense of regret.

In this first letter, Seneca is responding to Lucilius, who had written to Seneca about his desire to lead a better life, and how best to maintain his inner focus. These are the first few lines of Seneca’s response, starting at the very beginning:

LETTER 1

From Seneca to Lucilius, greetings

Continue, dear Lucilius, to free yourself: gather and protect your time, which until now was being taken from you, stolen from you, or simply vanished. Convince yourself of these words: some moments are robbed from us, some are stolen, and some just slip away.1

For Seneca, we lose much time, and much of life, through carelessness. When we are not paying attention, life just slips away. He then asks Lucilius, “Can you show me a single person who considers the worth of his time, who values the worth of each day, who realizes that he is dying every day?” And to make the matter even more pressing, Seneca adds, “We are mistaken to think that death lies in the future: much of death has already passed us by, unnoticed. Any years behind us are already in the hands of death.”2

When he wrote this, I don’t think Seneca was being unpleasant or moralizing, looking down his nose at the behavior of others and telling them how to live. Most likely, he was basing these insights on his own experience. When writing this letter, Seneca was around sixty-six years old, and if the reports from the ancient world are true, Nero was trying to poison him. In fact, around the same period Seneca wrote this letter, in another writing he looked back over his life with regret, and reflected on all the time he had wasted. As he frankly admitted, “Old age accuses me of having consumed my years in useless pursuits,” a situation Seneca was trying to remedy then, before it was too late: “Let us press on all the more and allow my work to repair the faults of a wasted lifetime.”3 If we read a bit between the lines, it’s tempting to imagine Seneca was thinking about the work he did for Nero when musing about his squandered years. For while Seneca’s work for Nero was highly lucrative in a financial sense, in the end Nero grew tired of Seneca and wanted him dead. Given that outcome, Seneca must have seen his work for Nero as being a waste of time, when he could have been doing something better. In fact, not long before he started writing the Letters, Seneca tried to disentangle himself from Nero as much as possible. Wanting to retire, Seneca made two attempts to return some of the wealth and properties he had received from Nero. But both times, Nero refused to take anything back and refused to let Seneca retire officially.

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.

Of course, how someone will find the right balance between work and leisure will vary for each person. The real problem for Seneca is that people become addicted to wealth—or what they believe to be wealth—and this leads to a mindset in which more is always needed. This belief then leads to the hustle and bustle of the preoccupied life. But for Seneca, the person who has enough, even if it is little, is already rich, while those who always seek more are poor. When you have “enough,” you also have time. But people engaged in a constant hustle to acquire more money and status postpone living now and lack the time needed to develop their inner lives.

OVERCOMING SLAVERY: A STOIC PATH TO FREEDOM

Most readers of Seneca will miss an important fact, and I discovered it only recently: Seneca reveals the key to understanding the entire project behind his Letters in the very first line of his very first letter. It’s like a secret message, hidden in plain sight.

While this message would have been evident to readers of the original Latin, it’s not apparent to readers of English translations.

The very first line of Seneca’s letter reads like this in English: “Continue, dear Lucilius, to free yourself: gather and protect your time, which until now was being taken from you, stolen from you, or simply vanished.” But the first part of this line in the Latin more accurately states: “Continue, dear Lucilius, to free yourself for yourself.”

The key phrase here is “free yourself for yourself,” which in the original Latin refers to freeing someone from slavery. In other words, Seneca’s first line of the Letters carries this meaning: “Continue, dear Lucilius—keep freeing yourself from slavery!”

If there was ever any good aspect of slavery in the ancient world, it could only have been that it was possible for a slave to become free. This process was known as manumission. During Seneca’s time, some freedmen or former slaves became extremely successful, wealthy, and high-ranking members of Roman society.

Significantly, three hundred years before Seneca, the earlier Greek Stoics developed the idea that in addition to being enslaved physically, it’s also possible to be enslaved psychologically. In a world where physical slavery was widespread, to speak about inner slavery was an extremely powerful idea, and one that carried an emotional charge. But the idea worked well because Stoic philosophy promised total human freedom on an internal level. Zeno stressed this idea in one of his famous “Stoic paradoxes,” the puzzling sayings the school was famous for. Full of dramatic impact, his cryptic maxim stated, “Only wise people are free, and everyone else is a slave.”10

While this saying was meant to draw attention to Stoic teachings by creating a mental shock in the mind of a reader, similar to an Internet meme today, it implied two separate ideas. The first is that it’s possible to be totally free, externally, but to still be a slave internally. The second is that Stoicism as a philosophy was designed to free its practitioners from the slavery of false judgments and opinions that lead to negative emotions like fear, anxiety, greed, anger, and resentment.11 And that is the exact project of Seneca’s Letters, too, as he reveals in the first line of the very first letter: it’s all about finding true freedom in life.

To give an example, if someone is always angry, snapping out at those around him day after day, that person is psychologically enslaved by negative emotions. But freedom is possible, too. And while the Stoics spoke about “psychological slavery,” we speak today of addiction, which is a related concept.

Elsewhere, Seneca explains, “That’s how it is, dear Lucilius”—while “slavery holds on to a few, many more hold on to slavery.” But if his desire for freedom is genuine, and if he wishes to lay his slavery aside, Seneca promises Lucilius that he’ll discover the freedom he seeks by progressing down the path of Stoic training.12

For people in ancient Greece and Rome, freedom did not mean so much the freedom “to do whatever you like” (or license); it meant the freedom of self-mastery or “freedom from.” It meant self-possession, belonging to yourself, and not being a slave to anything.

This idea that Stoic philosophy was a path leading out of slavery to freedom was even more strongly emphasized by the next great Roman Stoic after Seneca, Epictetus, who was himself, literally, a freed slave. (His name, Epictetus, means “owned” in Greek.)

In his classroom lectures, Epictetus humorously scolded his students, calling them “slaves,” when they were, in fact, the sons of wealthy Roman aristocrats. Like Zeno, Epictetus believed that “only the educated can be free.”13 He also said that a person training to become a Stoic resembles a slave working to become free.14 That graphic description of Stoic philosophy, and its power to free the mind from suffering, is a huge claim to make, and it’s one the Stoics genuinely believed.

Learning how to value and experience the fullness of time, for Seneca, is also a way to overcome another kind of slavery. It’s probably no coincidence that people today, who despise their nine-to-five jobs, often refer to themselves as “wage slaves.” But for modern people who feel imprisoned by time, Seneca offers the ultimate escape route.

LIVING IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME

For Seneca, “It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to live,” but the preoccupied mind of a constant workaholic takes in nothing deeply. By constantly focusing on how to reach higher levels of status or wealth in the future, preoccupied minds can’t fully enjoy the present moment. The greatest obstacle to living fully, Seneca writes, “is expectation, which depends on tomorrow and wastes today.”15

Life is divided into past, present, and future. But since preoccupied people have always been busy, they have little in the way of happy memories from the past. By comparison, people with tranquil minds have many happy memories. Because they weren’t always working, they had more free time to enjoy life deeply, and no one can take those memories away.

After discussing these points, Seneca makes a startling claim:

Of all people, only those who find time for philosophy are really at leisure—they alone really live. For not only do they guard over their own lifetimes, they add every age to their own. All the years that passed before them are added to their own.16

Seneca then explains that the great founders of the philosophical schools in the past gave human beings a way of life to follow and have passed onto us many valuable treasures. But all of these gifts, and even the greatest thinkers of past times, are things (and people) we still have access to, due to the power of the human mind. Thanks to this power, we don’t need to remain trapped in our own era. We can share in the work of past ages, and even debate with past philosophers like Socrates and Seneca, learning from them each day. In this way, we can “turn from this brief and fleeting span of time” and immerse ourselves in a more profound experience of time, “which is boundless, everlasting, and which we share with better minds.”17

Seneca believed that by having access to the philosophical minds of the past, a person will experience a deep sense of happiness until his dying day. In Seneca’s words, “He will have friends with whom he may consider the greatest and smallest matters, whom he may consult with daily about himself, and who will tell the truth without insult, offer praise without flattery, and who will provide a model on which to pattern his own character.”18 As he notes in another writing, “I spend my time with the very best company. No matter where, in which time they lived, I send my thoughts to be with them.”19

In this way, Seneca gives his readers a way to value the full range of time, to join a broader human community, and to escape the slavery of being forced to live only in the present age. He writes, the life of a wise person is

not constrained by the same limits that constrain others. He alone is freed from the conditions of the human race, and all ages serve him. . . . Some time passes? He holds it in memory. Time is present? He makes use of it. Time is to come? He anticipates it. Combining all times into one makes his life long.

But life is very brief and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they reach life’s end, the poor wretches realize, too late, that they’ve been busy for a long time doing nothing.20

In this remarkable insight, Seneca suggests that the happiest people are not just trapped in the present age. Instead, they can experience the ultimate value of time by weaving past, present, and future together. Here he no longer refers to time as being some kind of limited resource that we might someday run out of if we don’t use it wisely. We now transition from scarcity to being part of a timeless human community, which is inexhaustible.

Seneca challenges us to discover what is timeless and valuable about human nature, and to become better, deeper, and wiser people in the process.

We can now see that the alternative to “preoccupation” and racing around in a flurry of busyness is learning how to live more deeply. And for us today, this doesn’t require becoming a philosopher. Instead, developing an interest in art, music, architecture, science or astronomy, history or literature, or a spiritual tradition, to name a few, could help any modern person to live more deeply. Through these interests, we can take in the wisdom and accomplishments of the greatest thinkers from the past, with whom we can still form relationships. In this way, our lives are no longer limited to the present age, but enlarged and nourished by a timeless community of the human spirit.