The Brevity of Life
Life is short; Stoicism urges using every available moment for virtue and genuine flourishing rather than trivial pursuits.
Seneca's On the Shortness of Life argues that life is not short but that we waste most of it. Those who fill their time with trivial pursuits, excessive leisure, or anxious anticipation find themselves at the end with nothing to show. The person who lives fully — attending to virtue and genuine goods — finds that life is actually abundant.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a good deal of it.
Seneca's treatise on time management remains remarkably contemporary in its analysis of how humans squander their most irreplaceable resource.
De Brevitate Vitae
Written about in
- What Stoicism says about death
Seneca's argument is that life is not short — we waste most of it. The complaint is about how the time gets spent, not how much of it there is.