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.

Freedom

I am my liberty.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Surrounded 24/7 by unapologetic victims, it's easy for us to forget that freedom is everyone's birthright.

For celebrants, Christmas is the season of charity and compassion—or ought to be.

But both virtues assume victims require our philanthropic gestures, when, in fact, they're free: free to resist injustice; free to work for change; free to run away; free to cheat, rob and steal, if need be; free to rebel; free to displace you, or me, or whoever oppresses them.

Journalists, priests and fundraisers prey upon our compassion at Christmas, just as retailers prey upon our guilt and greed.

They can't help themselves.

But no one preys upon our connate freedom.

It takes an Existentialist to do that; to remind us we're born free and remain free every moment of our lives; to remind us no one is born a victim—or even becomes one unwillingly. 

We choose the mantles we wear.

"Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings," the guru Ram Dass said.

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you," the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said.

Remember compassion this Christmas; but remember freedom, too.  

All Shook Up

In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud lent his name to the parapraxis—the slip of the tongue—attributing this "verbal leakage" to a failure of the ego to repress a worrisome thought.

Psychologists today acknowledge the doctor was onto something when he identified the Freudian slip.

A parapraxis could indeed represent a failure of the ego to censor our unruly unconscious.

But what about the visual parapraxis?

The slip of the eye, which, although common, has no name in psychology.

My wife's frequent slips of the eye are a daily source of mirth in our home.

I could list them here, but I'd need a month. 

On occasion, I have slips of the eye, as well.

Yesterday, for example, I misread the ad headline "Learn to paint expressively" as "Learn to paint Elvis Presley."

Misreadings aren't the same as mondegreens, mishearings of song lyrics (for example, hearing Elvis sing "A midget like a man on a fuzzy tree" instead of "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.")

Misreadings, psychologists believe, can be due to any number of causes, including stress, distraction, exhaustion, bias, and good-old Freudian ego-failure.

My theory is that misreadings are a form of dissociation, those brief out-of-body experiences we all suffer (for example, when we daydream).

Misreadings, in fact, may constitute a form of Ganser syndrome, also known as "balderdash syndrome."

Balderdash syndrome is characterized by episodes of "pseudodementia," where you show show signs of dementia—including speech and language problems—even though you don't in fact have dementia.

In other words, when you're all shook up.

What slip of the eye did you last have?

Nouning

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

― Ernest Hemingway

The English language isn't precious; but it has its charms.

So when self-proclaimed wordsmiths defile it, I get pretty sore.

Among the greatest defilers are consultants.

When they speak, gibberish bursts from their mouths like puss from a boil; and when they write—or, as they prefer, when they "wordsmith"—clear English turns into hooey.

Consultants love, in particular, nouning: deadening verbs by converting them into nouns.

Nouning, they believe, elevates their jejune statements—and justifies their fees.

For example:

We're experiencing a disconnect.

Watch for my invite.

I know a foolproof hack.

That was an epic pivot.

That was an epic fail.

Equally vile are headline writers. 

When they start nouning, you'd better reach for the kidney dish. 

For example:

AMC hoping sales reach $5.2 billion. Here’s why that’s a big ask.

Windows 11 preview: What’s in the latest build?

Dems put divides aside, rally behind Biden.

Need a good eat plan?

Feeling anxious? Declutter your overwhlem.

Nouns like these aren't just pompous. They're nauseating.

"Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns," says wordsmith Henry Hitchens.

"We associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly."

Ugly is right.

So I ask—as your consultant—need a solve for this problem?

The next time you encounter a nouner, grab a hammer.

Day of Infamy

A malicious arson attack.

— Suzanne Scott

It seems the brutal War on Christmas came to Fox News this week when a vagrant torched the company's "All American" Christmas tree on New York's Avenue of the Americas.

Caught off guard, company executives immediately compared the incident to Pearl Harbor, even though police said the arsonist had no political motive.

In a memo to the staff, Fox News' CEO Suzanne Scott described the attack as "deliberate and brazen."

"This act of cowardice will not deter us," she said, promising a new All-American Christmas tree would be erected where the old one stood.

Within a day, one was.

At the relighting ceremony, on-air personality Jacques DeGraff told reporters, "These colors don't run," referring to the red, white and blue decorations.

Conflating Christmas with the 4th of July is classic Fox News.

But why network executives should get upset when a citizen then stages a fireworks show makes no sense.