Do you really think that we have accomplished more as a society and technologically or are exposed to more everyday than the Romans 2 thousands years ago?
Living the way we live is a modern invention, it has no more than 150 years, and it's already collapsing
Meanwhile Romans built a city where a million and
a half people lived and acqueducts to bring running clean water to all of them
They built roads to go to every part of the empire and bring back to Rome thousands of tons of construction materials, mainly marble
That they than used to build giant buildings that only many centuries later have been copied successfully
They built ships to go to Africa and bring back to Rome elephants, tigers, lions, giraffes, rhinoceros, ippos and many other wild animals, alive!
Imagine going in the streets of a modern city and meet an elephant, an animal that nowadays people rarely see in real life and think again about experiencing more than people in the past
They did it for 450 years and did it so well that there are no elephants or lions in northern Africa anymore
They were probably the best engineers and sokdiers in history, the Colosseum was built in mere 8 years
But
Their way of life was "otium et negotium" even if you don't know what they mean, neg-otium is clearly the negation of the world otium
They were the foundation of Romans success, they worked half a day (negotium) and spent the rest of the day in idleness (otium)
It was obviously different from today idea of "doing nothing at all" it meant more something like if you are free from the obligations of life, you can engage in intellectual activities
They spent a lot of time not doing any kind of work or duty related stuff and yet achieved so much
Only many centuries later the work became something organized that must be carried on during certain hours (shifts) in certain places for a certain amount of money
So basically in ancient history most of the times people never really worked continuosly on the same thing and valued a lot their free time as a way to improve themselves, if their condition allowed it
We must be very careful when we think that we have more time or have seen more things or are more advanced than ancient civilization
Seneca was very modern, he discovered something universal about human struggle between certainty of death and the mundane uneventful life that most of us live and that's why his ideas survived
He certainly wasn't stupid and certainly the average human of today is not more intelligent than Seneca just because they read more news on social networks...
Auto pilot is not really what I would describe life in ancient times
That's a modern idea probably best depicted by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, that was in fact shot in 1925 when the effects of the mass industrialization were becoming clear
Trivia: the tower of Babel in metropolis is modelled around this painting by Pieter Bruegel
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the...
where the tower of Babel is painted as recursive Colosseums, one inside the other, to express the idea that the Romans tried to reach god and were punished for their hubris (there is more to that, the Colosseum was also a place that symbolised persecution for Christians)