Wasted

Life is long if you know how to use it.

— Seneca

When I'm not painting pictures or otherwise working on my business, I feel out of sorts.

That's because much of the time I spend on other things—like watching TV, napping, daydreaming, driving to appointments, shopping, keeping house, fixing others' clerical errors (never-ending), haggling with cheats, and battling with broken software—seems largely wasted.

You probably feel the same.

In 49 AD, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a letter to his father-in-law that history has enshrined as the little book On the Shortness of Life. 

Scholars believe Seneca wanted to persuade the man, then in his 70s, to retire from his government job.

Seneca tells him, "The part of life we really live is small, for all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time."

Everyone wants to save time, as product-marketers well know.

But to what purpose?

Whenever I see an app advertised as as a "time-saver" (most of them), I wonder how the perky users depicted will use their extra time.

Probably watching videos on TikTok.

That would have made Seneca bonkers.

We don't need more apps to save us time: life grants us plenty of it, Seneca said; and it has been granted "in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested."

The trouble arises from wasting time. 

"When time is squandered in luxury and carelessness and devoted to no good end," Seneca says, "we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

"So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it."

To fritter time is to act as if it were unending, the philosopher says—when in fact it's terribly finite.

"How stupid to forget our mortality," Seneca says.

I agree with him.

To waste time is not to know its value.

Above: Five of Five by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches. Available.