Skip to content
david amos

On the Shortness of Life

  • letter

A letter from Seneca to his friend Paulinus, which I read as part of the collection On the Shortness of Life.

Themes

Section titled “Themes”

In “On the Shortness of Life” Seneca tackles that feeling of life passing us by before we know it:

This spell of time that has been given to us rushes by so swiftly and rapidly that with very few exceptions life ceases for the rest of us just when we are getting ready for it.

This feeling, he points out, isn’t limited to the “unthinking mass of people.” Even “distinguished men” suffer from it, a fact that led Hippocrates to decree “life is short, art is long.” But Seneca argues that it’s not the shortness of life that is the problem,1 but that we poorly invest our time:

Why do we complain about nature? She has acted kindly: life is long if you know how to use it.

Unfortunately, society does not make this easy for us:

Vices surround and assail men from every side, and do not allow them to rise again and lift their eyes to discern the truth, but keep them overwhelmed and rooted in their desires. Never can they recover their true selves.

We turn to vice, according to Seneca, because we “never deign to look at [ourselves] or listen to [ourselves].” We seek strangers’ company because we can’t bear our own. Our priorities are inverted, as evidenced by the fact that we guard closely our personal property, but squander the one thing “in which it is right to be stingy”: time.2

The reason for this, says Seneca, is that we live like we will live forever:

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

One sign of this is that we commonly justify our behavior by postponing “sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years.” But the truth is that we might die at any moment, so it is stupid to “[aim] to begin life from a point at which few have arrived.”

Seneca provides three examples to consider of famous men who cursed their own lives:

  • Agustus, who wrote and spoke so much of the leisure that all his wars and politics denied him.
  • Marcus Cicero, who “found neither peace in prosperity nor patience in adversity,” who, in a letter to Atticus near the ned of his life, complained about the past and despairing the future.
  • Livius Druses, who “is said to have cured the tubulent life he had always lived, saying that he alone had never had a holiday even as a child.”

For men like these, Seneca has quite the condemnation:

Though seeming to others the happiest of mortals, [they] bore true witness against themselves by their expressed hatred of every action of their lives. Yet they did not change themselves or anyone else by these complaints, for after their explosion of words their feelings reverted to normal. (Emphasis mine)

TO BE CONTINUED…

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. See also Life isn’t short, we just waste a lot of it. ↩

  2. See also Be stingy with your time. ↩