Seneca on The Shortness of Time (2017)
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I spent my twenties on auto-pilot, allowing external circumstances to effectively decide my life for me. Seneca and the Stoics reminded me of the immense agency I still possessed, despite the obscenity that was the recession and the cost of American Higher Education. I still had some say over my life, or at least over my choices, and if I didn't exercise my agency, life would slip through my fingers and hurtle to me a deathbed filled with regret and disappointment.
The quote from Epictetus:
"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates."
How did you? Just by reading Seneca, or was there more to it?
If you have grown up giving in to discomfort/pleasure, then you are conditioned to accept the same. It's harder now, but not impossible.
If a big choice is required, then first do a search of possible benefits, and vulnerabilities. Of what you would do if things went wrong, what the worst case scenarios are, and how to deal with them.
I made such an analysis when considering leaving graduate school to start a business, and it helped immensely in clarifying things.
You do ask a good question, as there are two separate questions in the quote from Epictetus: resolving upon a thing, and taking action to conform to it.
It seems OP had already resolved, they just needed to make the jump. The resolution stage has somewhat different demands.
For some, they may find that some factors preclude such a big jump. For instance, obligations to support a family, health issues, major consequences to failure and lack of a safety net, etc. If so, then the second part of the question doesn’t apply, as wishing for a different circumstance is merely a dream, not a resolution.
But, if your trouble is merely comfort and inertia, then slap your face with cold water and wake up. You only have one life. It is seeping away even as you read this comment.
If you want to do something else and you are not doing it, then comfort is your enemy. It lulls you into sticking with what is merely tolerable.
But you are dying. Focus on this, focus on the pain of that realization. It is this pain, this discomfort, that can let you resolve upon a change, whatever that may be in your circumstances.
Once you have resolved, then all becomes clearer. Save every penny you can. Discard comfort and focus on necessity, for the transition will be worse than both the comfortable present and the expected better future. Every bit of slack you can generate helps immeasurably.
Ask if you truly, truly want the change. Soul searching on your own with pen and paper is the best method I know, along with long walks.
If you do form this resolve, and truly decide you want it, hewing to this idea is what lets you break out of inertia.
The difficulty is that you can't reason yourself into having them, but must nurture them by other means. This used to be one of the primary goals of education, and is the primary value of a (proper) liberal arts education, as opposed to "critical thinking" skills.
The Stoics wrote about the importance of cultivating a contempt for pleasure. The Christians teach that you should "Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world" (1 John 2:15). Understood naively, these statements are a sure recipe for unhappiness and disaster. But properly understood, within a healthy aesthetic framework and with emotions trained in accordance to it, these statements obviously contain a large chunk of the secret to happiness and success.
I recommend watching this video for an extended introduction to this way of thinking: https://youtu.be/tX5e6eSkaMc
Behavioral cognitive therapy is aesthetics for beginners, or maybe "applied surgical aesthetics"
If, everytime you consider loafing around doing nothing (or worse, you wind up working all weekend on something you don't care about to make your boss rich), you think "I've got ~2500 sunday afternoons left, maybe 2000 in good health, maybe 500 while I have young kids", etc you consider how precious your time is.
And what are you going to do with it then? I totally realize how valuable the time is. This gives me tremendous anxiety and fear of missing out - it's so precious after all that I have to use in absolutely the best way possible. But what this best way would be?
So I end up in similar analysis paralysis that the one who spends more time choosing a movie to watch then actually watching it does. Needless to say that he also enjoys the movie less - because he is not sure that he made a right choice after all. And after that he realizes that he just waisted double the amount of movie time to something that he hadn't even liked.
IMHO putting time/productivity/goals/etc. as your top priority is a mistake. Similar to committing to some ideal from your childhood for the whole life. Unless yours and your close ones' personalitiea are not factored in, this is just a way to delude yourself into "productivity" trap.
For what it's worth, I find that if I focus on either making things or doing things with others, I'm happier than when I just consume. But I'm not a life coach - just a guy who spent waaaaayy too much time in my 20's playing videogames, staying in a college program I hated and should've dropped out of, and doing rather little to change it, until somehow the fact that I am, indeed, going to die one day and it's sooner than I think and there's stuff I want to do before then, really clicked in my head (and never went away).
Moral letters to Lucilius/Letter 82
Gives a slight taint to the meaning of the word 'progress'.
I'd argue though, that a good life is a balance between human condition and material needs. A kind of optimized frugality.
Math is applied philosophy and theory of knowledge.
Physics is Math applied on reality.
Chemistry is applied Physics.
Biology is applied Chemistry.
I've seen Susskind convincingly (albeit shallowly) argue that more "primitive" animals understand physics and I would be surprised if it was easy to argue that animals understand mathematics without circular logic or quick and loose definitions of what math is.
Of course, I have asked many philosophical questions of myself, when understanding software. This, I've noticed, especially happens when you're crossing layers. For example, between hardware / assembly, assembly / C, C / OOP.
However, considering that we have not really come up with a language with which we can communicate with computers seamlessly, I have my doubts. Because, unless we have a language, we can't really philosophize.
This could be a problem due to the interfaces we have though. Or probably, because our interfaces with computers seem to be getting broader and richer with each generation of hardware, we haven't really been able to freeze on the language through which we communicate.
Well, yes and no. We certainly know a lot more than people knew back then. We know vastly more about the cosmos, we know about atoms, we know about evolution, we know much about the brain.
We also face very different challenges than people millennia ago - we have weapons of mass destruction, more obesity than famine (in developed countries), social media, and so on.
Thus, I'd say only a small part of philosophy is still applicable and valuable today. (For example, Seneca was a Stoic, and Stoicism had much to say about physics and logic, which is pretty obsolete now, I'd say.)
There's a potential fallacy there, like thinking that old music was better, when what we still hear today is just the very best of old music.
People more than two millennia later still find what he said relevant. What is it that we have produced in the last century would meet that test ? How much of that will be due to our increased knowledge and technology ?
Knowing that physical and psychological state are linked, and that they affect each other.
We have ways of introspecting one's mind and body and understand the the "whys" of being an individual and also Human.
On that matter - my dad and my grandpa were alcoholics; and thus I have the same vice if I don’t pay attention to my motivations in life.
However knowing genetics didn’t help me understand that :)
I'd bet my left pinky that people knew this earlier in life than us because our society shields us from our true selves.
Too many distractions to the point it's harmful.
Just to put forward a few recent criticisms:
#1.
This quote is a very literal example of a sort of "man up" style of prescriptive thinking which tells you to solve your behavioral problems by Being More Manly. For the vast majority of people, being told to Be A Man doesn't work to alter behavior in the long run, it discourages self esteem and offers no practical guidance. If studying mammalian behavior is any guide, this sort of advice is likely a product of a man's instinctual dominance drive. Males love to give advice because when it sounds good it helps them accrue status and cement their position in the dominance hierarchy, which increases their mating options.
We have numerous moderns alternative to Be A Man if you want to change your behaviors, the best ones are based on the past 50 years of research into how the brain works. They typically focus on understanding emotional, unconscious, or instinctual behavior and working out how to process these things more productively. Examples include cognitive behavioral therapy (and a host of similar emerging therapies), or BJ Foggs' Tiny Habits framework (which was recently shared on HN).
#2.
For a criticism of a totally different tack, Epictetus and Seneca are both operating within a rigid framework that privileges values such as efficiency, self-improvement, and accomplishment. Presumably, they see these things as the best path to happiness.
Why are these values privileged? What authority has established that any of them, including personal happiness, are important and meaningful to pursue? In the past century we've been exposed to multiple strains of existentialist, postmodernist, and nihilist thought which all emerge from the same revelation--existence fundamentally has no meaning, all value systems are human constructs, and the universe is much larger than our day to day struggles.
All our traditional values are now beset by refutations. We believed in God, but centuries of scientific progress have dispelled the evidence supporting His existence. We believed in civilization, but our largest societies went on to slaughter millions. We thought the universe revolved around us, but learned that we're ants crawling on the face of a pale blue dot, of no consequence in the cosmos to any but our own self-centered perspective.
This might all sound pretty dark, but the good news is that nothing you do is really important. The universe will remain unperturbed no matter what actions you take (or don't)! So if you're stressing about how well you live, remember that you're merely chasing fictions in a framework that someone else cooked up.
This is a modern day revelation that would never have been achieved without modern science and rationalism, and is still developing. There are as many views on how to process existence's meaninglessness as there are philosophers. To name a few: Nietschze's will to power, Camus' absurdism, Sartre's pursuit of personal freedom. Alternatively it's fine to spend your afternoon playing Xbox, no matter what your parents say.
#3,4,5++
I'm sure there are more!
This is an interesting idea - theoretically, there should be a possible action that "perturbs" the universe. It's a matter of scale and efficiency, so this sounds like an engineering problem rather than a philosophical one.
I'm not really convinced by this type of reasoning. Things do matter if people care very deeply about them. If someone murdered someone close to you (to take an extreme example), would you still say that that is fine, because in the grand scheme nothing matters? You might say that you're an irrational human being, and that's why you care. But why should we take a definition of "meaningful" that is so disjoint for everyday human experience?
What would a hypothetical world look like in which life does have meaning, according to your definition? If no such world is even imaginable, then it isn't even clear what we are talking about.
Furthermore, I think some people use the supposed "meaninglessness" of life to justify passivity. If the universe is truly meaningless, then doing nothing is as meaningful as doing something traditionally considered meaningful.
Yet, people often base their behavior on their current emotional state. That is not the behavior of someone who believes in the complete meaninglessness of everything. Clearly, that person believes that his emotions matter and are a good guide to choose which actions to take. Playing Xbox on the couch or ruminating about the meaninglessness of life being good examples of this. Such actions are choices that are ultimately derived from value judgments.
If having a work ethic gets you through your day--OK, have one.
But you don't have a "better way of thinking" than someone who's lazy in any meaningful way. Nor are you more intrinsically valuable than them, outside of a very local context in time, space and culture.
Sure if I lose a loved one it's going to affect me deeply and I will grieve, but as a matter of likely fact, I will someday move on (as any good psychologist would advise). The meaning of death and its impact are not universal, merely local.
In my opinion the essential lessons are two. One is very practical. It is about humility and perspective.
The second is more esoteric. It is about freedom. The existential crisis sets you free. But like the lifelong convict who has just been released by his jailor, it remains up to you to be free.
How about "How to think like a crippled Greek slave who was freed"? Doesn't sound that impressive. That is Epictetus, who has left an indelible mark on Marcus Aurelius, who copiously rephrases him. Having read a few translations of both, Aurelius and Epictetus, I firmly suggest to start with Epictetus, because of his structured approach, pungent and forceful prose, use of hyperbole, heavy irony, sarcasm, humor and other devices.
For those intersted in Epictetus, based on my deep-dive into his work, here is my long-term suggested reading for the next two years (in that order):
• Discourses, Fragments and Handbook (translation by Robin Hard, intro by Christopher Gill; Oxford University Press).
• Encheiridion, and Selections from Discourses, by A.A. Long. This is a short book; the value addition here is the introduction, and the outstanding glossary. (NB: there is no escaping full Discourses of Epictetus.)
• The Inner Citadel, by Pierre Hadot. This is a fantastic dissection of Marcus Aurelius' work; Hadot studied him for 25 years. It also contains unparalleled summary of Epictetus, and many quotes of Seneca.
• Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide, by A.A. Long. Important Note: to get maximum value out of this, you must have already read at least one translation of Epictetus' full Discourses! This book orients the reader to Epictetus with an extremely valuable context: how not to misinterpret his unqualified faith in "divine providence" (which can grate on our "modern ears"); the influence of Plato and the "Socratic elunchus" (colloquially known as "Socratic Method"); deep insights into Epictetus' own inimitable style; and a rich bibliography. A.A. Long is a star.
• If you've come this far, you must also read the 1927 edition of Epictetus translation, the two-book Loeb edition of Discourses; by W.A. Oldfather.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” ― Sylvia Plath
1. The point is not to "do what you love", but to "love what you do".
Trying to do what you love is destined to fail quickly: there's always something else, there's always a part of the job you don't like, and you never truly have control over the very fact that you love something or not, at least not if you approach it like that — you'd be condemned to follow your emotions as the only decision maker for your choices in life. But emotions are meant to guide us (it's information, just the language of the body), not control us.
Loving what you do, however, is a totally different process, and quickly becomes a choice as you flex that muscle: essentially it's about putting "good will" into all your actions, it's about this idea that "how you do anything is how you do everything"; to sincerely try with an open mind and being positive about it. Several things follow from this simple practice, mindset:
- we are creatures of habit, and the more we do something, usually the more we like it. It's just how the brain is wired — that's how marketing works, by sheer repetition, law of numbers. Propaganda and manipulation as well. "Self-programming" yourself to be able, in time, to grow positive feelings about anything you have to do is really a sort of superpower in this day and age.
- Here's an equation: effort + love = mastery (alternatively, you may see grit + passion = skill, any variation like that). The message is clear: lots of effort (time, regularity, repetition) and lots of love (but that part comes from the doing, it's mechanical unless you resist it) is how we build ourselves, and happiness among other things follows from that (because nobody can take away such happiness from you, it's internal).
- It seems that we all score differently on that scale, the term is conscientiousness, but it is my belief that it can be trained by force of will + action, i.e. determination (to commit to do it, whether you are "motivated" or not, regardless of emotions) + effort (marathon: paced, sustained, repetition, long-term).
It takes about 20 days to break a habit, and 3 months to form a new one. Probably about a year to make it last virtually forever, unless detrained.
These simple things have huge effects over the psyche (happiness notably) in the long run. Massive compound effects.
2. Another thing is the idea of "meaning", purpose, the "why" we do what we do. As far as I'm concerned, this matter is solved: you create meaning for yourself. That's it. We all make a patchwork from bits and pieces from all over the place, and it may appear of its own as a child or never for a lifetime, but ultimately, it's a conscious act, a decision you make. Meaning is the result of volition, internal drive to give substance to the world; those who seek it externally may be amazed at others but probably feel empty themselves until they become the creators of their own interpretation, their own meaning. Purpose is what you say it is.
The short TL;DR is that if you picked up anything and worked diligently at it for 10 years, you'd come out the other side an expert and loving it (average/normal human response to that situation).
That may be true for some, but for me the more I do something the less I like it.
I need a lot of variety or I get bored and burnt out on whatever it is I'm doing, no matter how much I used to like it when I first started.
In some cases an absence of years or even decades has not rekindled my interest in what I used to love but overdid.
Doing something over and over and over again eventually kills my passion.
> the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
This whole idea of filling time with 'work' like it is a race is completely antithetical to any idea of joy and fulfilment.
It feels like 'wasting' time or downtime is essential to meaningful productivity.
I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be. -- Peter Gibbons.
There is a tradition of meditation in Stoicism that invites us to take it easy and reflect on what we have, instead of hurrying to an arbitrary destination, given to us by our bosses, or society.
From the same essay:
Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But 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 to a man who is already full and satisfied food which he does not want but can hold. So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
...which uses: https://www.amazon.com/Shortness-Life-Penguin-Great-Ideas/dp...
The core issue remains: if you don't have a plan for your life, society will make a plan for you.
By making your own destiny, you may fill part of your time with work, but only as long as it serves your purpose.
How good is your idea of wasting time to get meaningful productivity, if you are achieving someone else's goals instead of your own?
That's a great point actually - the someone else's goals part. The whole intelligence in service of madness thing stems from the fact that sane and intelligent people sometimes do not have a goal of their own.
I definitely did not mean to imply that idling is the only thing you do with your life - on the contrary I was trying to say idling is a great way of knowing who you are and coming up with general goals for yourself that you can then fulfill in the rest of the time.
The problem with busy life is you never really dream of your goals and are constantly looking for things to do - it makes it almost eventual that you'll be in service of others' goals. That's not always a bad thing but I find no fulfillment in doing just that.
I have a suspicion that the majority only have a vague idea and they mostly end up where they are by happenstance.
You only plan to choose various plans society has for you. There is no plan that is viable out of society’s general direction, if you participate in any constructive way.
Seneca, Socrates and many others were just a tip of the iceberg, and they quickly go underwater, when that iceberg decided to flip or crack. It is okay to achieve others goals if you get paid enough and do not have to constantly fight (iow carry huge risks) through your life.
Their perspective is useful, in a way Jocko Willink motivation videos are useful, but you don’t really go to a full-blown war after watching these, nor are you ready for it.
Slight anecdote, as a health improvement I started jogging in the woods last summer. My brain is still recovering from a lot of nasty sensations and I'm very sensitive to any form of happy emotions. Whenever I run, I'm free to pick my path, and this feels like a very raw form of happiness seeking. If a part of the forest appeals to me (because it's new, or the sun shines differently through it, or if it's more challenging) I do it and it appeases something in me.
Like everything, the key is finding the right balance - between activity and rest, between production and consumption, between relationships and solitude. There is no easy answer to what the right ratios are, and they will vary by person and by the stage in life.
> “A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.”
The critical thing that I'm missing is how does one go about finding the value of their life exactly?
[1] - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius
other brands are available..
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/three-huge-volumes-of-sto...
"Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested."
What are "great things" and what is the definition of a "well-invested life"? Most of us will live rather unremarkable lives, most likely forgotten in a hundred years or so (at best!). Who says a "good life" means being remembered as long as possible by future humans? Who says the point of living is not to live in luxury and carelessness?
It just seems to me that Seneca assumes the stoic world-view to be the norm. Can anyone help me understand?
Some folks find satisfaction in raising then next generation. Others want a statue of themselves somewhere that lasts for a few hundred years beyond their own life. Some folks create, others are satisfied with minimal impact.
It's all personal, but considering it and then acting on it is the core idea. Otherwise time carries on regardless and you get to the end to look back over a pointless meandering. Which, if you consider that to be ok, is also fine.
I realized recently that I never fully understood ‘time is money’, never felt it first-hand truly and deeply, until I tried to start my own business. Then I ‘discovered’ that money directly extended the amount of time I could chase my dream and feed my family. Having a job never gave me the sense that I was buying time, maybe because it’s not finite in the same way the startup is.
I think modern life kills this. Too many things are too comfortable and too stressful (as in short burst of opposite stimuli).