On the Shortness of Life

A short moral essay in the form of a letter to Paulinus, an official in charge of Rome's grain supply. Seneca rejects the common complaint that life is too short. Life is long enough, he argues, if we use it well; we make it short by wasting it. He describes the 'preoccupied', people absorbed in ambition, business, luxury, favours and other people's demands, who guard their money carefully but give away their time to anyone who asks. They postpone real living until retirement, which may never come, and even the emperor Augustus longed for a leisure he never enjoyed. Seneca also mocks scholars who spend their days on useless historical trivia. True leisure belongs only to those who give their time to philosophy, since they can spend it in the company of Socrates, Zeno, Epicurus and the other great minds of the past, and so make every age their own. He ends by urging Paulinus to withdraw from office while he still can.

It is a short, direct Stoic argument about how we spend our time, and its diagnosis of busyness and postponed living feels written for the present.