It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it – Seneca

Another insightful quote said by the Roman philosopher Seneca, 2000+ years ago. If you noticed i quote Seneca a lot, you are right, here’s some of Seneca’s best quotes.

Back to this quote, it is part of a larger text:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, 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: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

In modern day terms, Seneca is talking about procrastination, read this article about this modern disease: Why We Procrastinate, How to Overcome Procrastination!

If we look at Seneca’s quote and compare it to modern day life, we fall in one of several scenarios:
– People who spend life doing meaningless jobs and gigs, and achieve nothing to be proud of.
– Those who follow careers, make good money, but see time flying by.
– Those who do what they like, but spend life on the margin due to lack of proper commitment to what they do.

There are of course those who do what they like and commit to it, those who try to change things, and those who follow their dreams … but those are the minority.

Basically most of us, fail to take advantage of life fully, fail to fulfill our dreams, fail to live a fun and enjoyable life and fail to do something worth being proud of. All this failure is due to our bad management of time, and to some decisions due to necessities of life. It is also true that modern society, forces you to give a lot of your time to create a security for you and your loved ones.