On the Shortness of Life

Overview

On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae) is Seneca's great essay on time, addressed to his father-in-law Paulinus around 49 CE. Its argument is a paradox: life is not short, but we make it short by wasting it. "It is not that we have a short time to live," Seneca writes, "but that we waste a lot of it." The essay is the classic statement of the Stoic philosophy of time: time is the one possession that cannot be recovered, the only true measure of a life, and the art of living is the art of possessing one's own time. The work develops two great themes: the critique of busyness — the endless pursuit of business, pleasure, and ambition that consumes life without ever giving it back — and the praise of leisure — the life of philosophy, in which the soul at last possesses itself and its time.

Author

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) was the most important Stoic philosopher of the Roman world, the tutor of Nero, and the author of the moral essays and letters that made Stoicism the most practical philosophy of the West. His essays — On the Shortness of Life, On Anger, On the Happy Life, On Tranquility of Mind — are the masterworks of the Roman Stoic tradition.

Historical Background

Seneca wrote the essay at the height of his own busyness: he was a senator, an orator, a playwright, and the tutor of the young emperor, at the center of the most demanding political life in the world. The essay is thus self-address as much as advice: the man who had everything except time writing about the one thing that cannot be bought. It belongs to the tradition of the Roman moral essay, the sermo or "conversation," which addressed the conduct of life in the direct, personal, rhetorical style that the Romans had perfected. And it reflects the Stoic conviction, inherited from the Greek tradition, that the philosophical life is the only truly free life — the life in which the soul is not the servant of business, pleasure, or ambition.

Key Ideas

The essay's first movement is the correction of the complaint. We complain, Seneca says, that life is short, but the fault is not in the shortness of life but in our use of it: "We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it." The busy man — the man of affairs, the man of pleasure, the man of ambition — does not possess his life at all: it is taken from him by his occupations, and "the mind is never at leisure, never in its own possession."

The essay's second movement is the account of the truly possessed life. The only person who lives is the one who has given their life to the pursuit of wisdom: the philosopher, who "has arranged the affairs of every age" and lives in the past and the future as well as the present. "The greatest hindrance to living is expectation," Seneca writes — the endless deferral of life to the future, which "depends on tomorrow and wastes today." The cure is the Stoic practice of the present: to live each day as a complete life, to "arrange matters so that each day is like a life in itself," so that death, whenever it comes, finds nothing unfinished.

The essay's third movement is the famous account of the two forms of leisure. There is the leisure of the busy man — the holiday that is really the continuation of business by other means — and there is the leisure of the philosopher, in which the soul withdraws into itself and its own resources. The first is a form of waste; the second is the only life that is truly one's own. The essay concludes with the praise of the philosophical life as the life that cannot be taken away: the life "that has no need of the approval of the many," and that "is never idle even in idleness."

Important Passages

The most famous passage of the essay is its opening: "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it." Equally famous is the account of expectation: "The greatest hindrance to living is expectation, which depends on tomorrow and wastes today." And the essay's deepest sentence is its account of the possessed life: "Those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future have a life that is very short and troubled" — the diagnosis of the wasted life in a single sentence.

Influence

On the Shortness of Life has been one of the most read works of classical philosophy in the modern period. Its critique of busyness speaks directly to the modern condition, and it has been quoted by everyone from Montaigne to the modern Stoic movement. The essay is the classic statement of the Stoic philosophy of time, and it connects the Stoic tradition to the wider meditation on mortality — the memento mori practice that runs from antiquity through the Christian tradition to the present.

Sources

• Seneca. On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae). Trans. C.D.N. Costa. London: Penguin, 1997.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Seneca" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca)
• Wilson, Emily. The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.