On the Shortness of Life | Moment Library

Seneca wrote "De Brevitate Vitae" (On the Shortness of Life) around 49 AD as a letter to his father-in-law Paulinus. Nearly two thousand years later, his insights on time, distraction, and intentional living feel startlingly relevant.

This is not a literal translation but a modern rendering—updated for contemporary readers while preserving Seneca's core arguments. The goal is accessibility without losing depth.

I

Everyone complains that life is too short. We're born, we blink, and suddenly we're old; our time runs out just as we're figuring out how to use it. This isn't just the grumbling of ordinary people. Even the greats have made this complaint. Hippocrates said "life is short, art is long." Aristotle, a philosopher of all people, accused Nature of playing favorites: tortoises live for centuries while humans, supposedly destined for greatness, barely get a few decades.

But here's the truth: life isn't short. We just waste most of it.

We have plenty of time. Enough to accomplish extraordinary things, if we invest it wisely. But we squander it on luxury and carelessness and pointless pursuits, and then when death finally arrives, we're shocked to discover that life slipped away while we weren't paying attention.

We don't receive a short life. We make it short. We're not given too little time. We throw most of it away.

When a fortune falls into the hands of a fool, it vanishes instantly. But a modest sum, managed wisely, grows. Life works the same way: it stretches far for those who manage it well.

II

Why blame Nature? She's been generous. Life is long enough if you know how to use it.

But one person is consumed by greed that nothing can satisfy. Another exhausts themselves on pointless busywork. One is always drunk. Another is paralyzed by laziness. One chases approval and status, their ambition entirely dependent on what others think. Another, obsessed with profit, travels every land and sea seeking the next deal. Some are addicted to conflict, always either threatening others or worried about threats to themselves. Some choose voluntary slavery, endlessly serving people who will never appreciate them. Many spend their time chasing other people's money or complaining about their own. Many have no real goals at all, drifting from one plan to another, restless and dissatisfied, never settling on anything. Some care so little about their lives that death catches them yawning.

A great poet put it well: "The part of life we actually live is very small."

The rest isn't life; it's just time passing.

Our vices surround us, keeping us pinned down, preventing us from lifting our eyes toward truth. Even when we escape momentarily, we're like the sea after a storm, still heaving, never truly calm.

You think I'm only talking about the obviously wretched? Look at the people everyone admires. They're suffocating under their own success. How many are crushed by their wealth? How many have ruined themselves showing off their talents? How many have wrecked their health chasing pleasure? How many have lost all freedom to the crowd of people surrounding them?

Go through the list, from bottom to top. This one needs an advisor. That one is always on call. This one is defending themselves in court. That one is defending someone else. No one claims themselves for themselves. Everyone is wasted on someone else.

Look up the famous names, the ones everyone knows. You'll find they're all defined by their service to others. A trained B. B mentored C. No one belongs to themselves.

III

Here's what baffles me: people get outraged when someone important won't make time for them. But how can you complain about others not giving you time when you won't give yourself any?

At least those important people occasionally glance your way. They sometimes listen. They let you stand nearby. But you never look at yourself, never listen to your own needs, never spend time with yourself. Why should anyone owe you their attention when you can't even stand your own company?

If every genius in history gathered to study this problem, they couldn't adequately express their amazement at human blindness. People guard their property fiercely. The slightest boundary dispute and they're ready to fight. Yet they let others invade their lives freely. They even invite the invasion.

You won't find anyone willing to give away their money. But look how freely people give away their time.

People are misers with their wealth but spendthrifts with the only thing that actually matters.

Imagine confronting an old person: "You've reached the end of human life, nearly a hundred years. Let's do an accounting. How much of your time went to creditors? How much to your boss? How much to arguing with your partner? How much to socializing? How much to the diseases you brought on yourself? How much just sat there unused?

"You'll find you have far fewer years than you count. Think about it: when did you ever have a real plan? How few days went the way you intended? When did you make time for yourself? When did your face show its natural expression instead of a performance? What have you actually accomplished in all this time? How much was stolen by people who didn't even realize they were stealing your life? How much was lost to pointless worry, foolish excitement, greedy wanting? How little was left for you?

"You'll realize: you're dying before you've really lived."

Why does this happen? Because you live as if you'll live forever. Your fragility never crosses your mind. You don't notice time already gone. You waste it as if you had an endless supply, when any day could be your last. You have the fears of a mortal and the desires of an immortal.

You hear people say: "After fifty, I'll relax. After sixty, I'll retire." What guarantee do you have that you'll get there? Who promised you those years?

How embarrassing to only reserve for yourself the scraps of your own life, to postpone wisdom until you're too old to use it. How late to start living just as life is ending. How foolish to forget your mortality and wait until fifty or sixty to begin, an age many never reach.

IV

You'll find that even the most powerful people dream of rest. They praise leisure above everything. They fantasize about stepping down, if only they could do it safely. Power collapses under its own weight.

Consider Augustus, the Emperor. The gods gave him more than anyone else, yet he never stopped wishing for escape from public life. Everything he said circled back to one hope: rest. He consoled himself through endless work with the sweet but unrealistic thought that someday he'd live for himself.

In a letter to the Senate, he wrote: "It's more impressive to do these things than to promise them. But since the reality is still far off, my longing for that much-desired time has led me to taste some of its delight in words alone." Leisure mattered so much to him that, unable to enjoy it, he savored it in imagination.

This was the man everything depended on, the fate of individuals and nations. Yet he felt happiest picturing the day he could set his greatness aside. He knew firsthand how much sweat those worldwide triumphs cost, and how many hidden anxieties lay beneath their shine.

He was forced to fight with fellow citizens, then colleagues, then family. He shed blood on land and sea. After marching through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Asia, he turned his armies toward foreign enemies once they grew tired of slaughtering Romans. While he was conquering borders and defeating rebels, back in Rome, assassins were sharpening their blades.

His plots barely escaped, his daughter's scandals tormented him. He cut away these problems like infected limbs, but new ones kept growing. The body politic was always hemorrhaging somewhere. That's why Augustus prayed for leisure. This was the wish of the man who could grant everyone else's wishes.

V

Cicero was thrown between enemies and unreliable friends: Catiline and Clodius on one side, Pompey and Crassus on the other. He tried to steady the ship of state as it sank, but was finally swept away. He found peace in neither prosperity nor adversity. How many times he cursed that consulship of his, which he praised endlessly but which brought him endless trouble.

In a letter to his friend Atticus, after Pompey's defeat, he wrote: "You ask what I'm doing? I'm lingering at my villa, half-free."

Half-free. A wise person would never accept such a term. They would never be half-free but always completely free: subject to no one, master of themselves, above everyone else. What can be above someone who rises above fortune itself?

VI

Livius Drusus was an ambitious, driven man who championed radical reforms and became the center of a huge political movement. But when he couldn't see a way forward, unable to proceed but unable to back out, he complained bitterly that he'd never had a vacation, not even as a child. While still underage, he was arguing cases in court and wielding political influence so effectively that he won cases others thought unwinnable.

Where would such precocious ambition end? Anyone could have predicted that boldness like this would become disastrous. It was too late to complain about never having rest when he'd been a troublemaker since childhood. He died suddenly from a wound to the groin. Some said by his own hand, but no one denied the timing was appropriate.

There's no point listing more examples of people who seemed blessed but secretly despised every moment of their lives. Their complaints changed nothing: not themselves, not others. After venting, they went right back to their old patterns.

Your life, even if it lasted a thousand years, would shrink to nothing. Your vices would devour any amount of time. Good management can stretch your natural lifespan. But you? Time escapes you. You don't seize it. You don't slow it down. You let it pass as if there's plenty more coming.

VII

Among the worst offenders are those who give all their time to drinking and sex, the most shameful preoccupations. Others at least go wrong in pursuit of something respectable. You can cite the greedy, the angry, even the warlike, but at least they sin like adults. Those devoted to their stomach and their appetites bear the stain of disgrace.

Look at how such people spend their hours. Scheming. Flattering. Fearing. Social obligations. Dinners that have become work in themselves. Their pleasures and their pains leave them no room to breathe.

Here's the core truth: a distracted person can't truly master anything, not their craft, not the arts, because a scattered mind takes nothing in deeply. It bounces everything off.

Of all skills, the hardest to learn is how to live. Teachers for other subjects are everywhere. Some disciplines can be mastered so young that children can teach them. But learning to live takes an entire lifetime. And, this might surprise you more, learning to die also takes an entire lifetime.

Many distinguished people have abandoned wealth, business, and pleasure to focus entirely on learning how to live. Yet most of them die admitting they still don't know. If they couldn't learn after a lifetime of trying, what chance does everyone else have?

It's the mark of a great person to let no part of their time be stolen. Such a person's life is extremely long because they keep every moment for themselves. Nothing lies idle. Nothing belongs to someone else. Being the most careful guardian of their time, they find nothing worth trading it for.

They have enough. Those who give most of their life away necessarily have too little.

VIII

Don't imagine these people are unaware of their loss. You'll hear the successful cry out amid their obligations: "I never get to live my own life!" Of course you don't. Everyone who engages you for their business disengages you from yourself.

How many of your days did that defendant take? That candidate? That wealthy person you're hoping will remember you in their will? Check your account. Run through your days. You'll find very few stayed in your possession, and those were the worthless ones.

The person who finally achieved high office longs to be done with it: "When will this year end?" The one who puts on the games says: "When will I be free of this?" The lawyer surrounded by admirers asks: "When's vacation?"

Everyone races through life, longing for the future, hating the present. But the person who organizes each day as if it were their whole life neither longs for nor fears tomorrow. What new pleasure could any hour bring? They've experienced everything. They've enjoyed it all. Fortune can do what it wants; their life is already secure. More can be added, but nothing taken away. Like someone already full who takes another bite, not from hunger but because there's room.

So don't think someone has lived long just because they have gray hair and wrinkles. They haven't lived long. They've only existed long.

Imagine a sailor who sets out and immediately gets caught in a storm. Winds blow them in circles over the same stretch of sea. They haven't traveled far; they've just been tossed around a long time.

IX

I'm always amazed when people ask others for their time and receive such accommodating responses. Both parties focus on the request itself. Neither considers the time. It's asked for as if it were nothing. Given as if it were nothing. People treat the most precious thing in existence like it's worthless, because it's invisible, because you can't hold it.

People place enormous value on money. They'll hire out their labor, their attention, their entire lives for a salary. But no one values time. Everyone spends it lavishly, as if it cost nothing.

Yet watch these same people when they're dying, suddenly grasping their doctors' hands, suddenly willing to pay anything to stay alive. The inconsistency is staggering.

If people could see their remaining years as clearly as the years already passed, how alarmed would those with only a few left be? How carefully would they use them?

It's easy to budget a small amount when you know exactly what you have. You must be more careful with something that could run out at any moment.

X

Don't think these people are unaware of how precious time is. They tell their loved ones: "I'd give you some of my own years." And they do give them, without realizing it. The catch? Their gift doesn't add years to anyone else. It only subtracts from themselves. But they don't notice the theft, so they can bear the loss.

No one will return your years. No one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began, never reversing, never pausing. It won't make a sound. It won't announce how fast it's moving. It will glide by in silence. It won't extend itself for any ruler or any crowd.

The outcome? You've been preoccupied while life hurries past. Death arrives. Ready or not, you have to accommodate it.

XI

What's more foolish than those who pride themselves on their planning? They work so hard to live better that they spend their life preparing for life. They form plans for the distant future. But postponement is the greatest waste of life: it takes away each day by promising tomorrow. Expectation is the enemy of living. You lose today by depending on a tomorrow that may never come.

You manage what fortune controls while letting go of what you control yourself. Where are you looking? What are you reaching for? Everything future is uncertain. Live right now.

The greatest poet cried out as if delivering an oracle:

"The best days of wretched mortals are the first to flee."

Why hesitate? Why hold back? If you don't seize the day, it escapes. And even when seized, it still slips away. You must race against time's speed, drinking from it like a torrent that won't flow forever.

The poet says not "the best years" but "the best days." Even today is fleeing. So why do you project months and years ahead as if your greed has any guarantee?

Old age catches people while their minds are still childish, unprepared and unarmed because they made no provision for it. Suddenly they've stumbled upon it, noticing only at arrival.

Just as a traveler deep in thought finds they've reached their destination before realizing they were close, so with life's journey: the preoccupied notice it only at its end.

XII

Life divides into three parts: past, present, future. The present is brief. The future is uncertain. The past is certain; fortune no longer controls it.

Preoccupied people lose the past. They have no time to look back, and even if they did, there's no pleasure in remembering regrets. So they avoid revisiting times badly spent; their vices become obvious in hindsight.

Only those whose actions pass their own honest assessment look back gladly. A person who's been greedy, arrogant, treacherous, selfish, wasteful: such a person fears their own memory.

Yet the past is sacred. It's beyond fortune's reach. No poverty, fear, or disease can touch it. It can't be disrupted or stolen. We possess it forever.

Days arrive one at a time, moment by moment. But all past days attend you whenever you call them, allowing you to examine and hold them as long as you wish, something preoccupied people never have time to do.

A peaceful mind can roam freely over all of life's terrain. But preoccupied minds, like animals under the yoke, can't turn around. Their life disappears into an abyss.

Just as pouring liquid into a leaky vessel accomplishes nothing, so time given to minds full of holes achieves nothing; it passes right through.

The present is so brief it seems nonexistent. It's always in motion, slipping away, ceasing before it arrives. The preoccupied focus only on this fleeting present, and even that little bit is stolen because they're pulled in too many directions.

XIII

Want to know how briefly such people really live? Watch how desperately they want to live longer.

Old people beg in their prayers for a few more years. They pretend to be younger than they are. They deceive themselves as happily as if they could deceive fate. But when illness finally reminds them they're mortal, they're terrified, as if death were dragging them away rather than ushering them out.

They cry that they've been fools, that they never really lived, that they'll finally live leisurely if only they recover. Then they realize how pointlessly they prepared for things they'd never enjoy, how fruitless all their striving was.

But for those who keep far from busyness? Their time is always ample. They keep it for themselves. They don't scatter it, don't gamble it on fortune, don't waste it through neglect, don't give it away carelessly. Every bit counts. So however short, it's sufficient.

When their last day arrives, the wise won't hesitate. They'll walk to death with a steady step.

XIV

You want to know who I call preoccupied? Not just the obvious cases: lawyers driven from court only when doors close, executives crushed by their own crowds, people running between obligations.

Even some people's leisure is preoccupied. In their country house, on their couch, in complete solitude, they're still terrible company for themselves. That's not leisure. It's idle preoccupation.

Do you call it leisure to obsessively arrange your collectibles, spending hours on artifacts? To watch sports with fanatical attention? To track every detail of athletes' careers?

Is it leisure to spend hours at the groomer, consulting anxiously over each hair, raging if a strand is out of place? Some people would rather have their country in chaos than their hair. They care more about looking good than being safe, more about being well-groomed than well-respected.

What about those absorbed in music, twisting their voice into elaborate flourishes, always humming some tune even when asked to focus on serious matters? Their fingers constantly snapping to internal rhythms? That's not leisure; it's busy idleness.

Their dinner parties aren't leisure either, not with all that anxious arrangement of silverware, careful dressing of staff, breathless waiting to see how dishes turn out, performance of carving and serving. Their vices follow them everywhere. They can't eat or drink without showing off.

Then there are those carried everywhere in chairs, arriving precisely on schedule for their daily routines, having to be reminded when to bathe, swim, or eat. They've become so weak from pampered laziness that they can't tell if they're hungry on their own.

I heard about one such person, lifted from the bath and set in their chair, who asked: "Am I sitting now?" Someone who doesn't know if they're sitting: do they know if they're alive? If they're seeing? If they're at leisure?

It's hard to say if I pity them more for truly not knowing or for pretending not to know. They're genuinely oblivious to many things, but they also perform obliviousness as a status symbol. Knowing what you're doing seems to them like something only lowly people bother with.

People assume actors exaggerate when mocking luxury. Actually, they leave out more than they invent. So many unbelievable vices have emerged in our age that we can accuse performers of understating reality.

Someone so ruined by pampering that they need to be told whether they're sitting isn't at leisure. They're sick. They're practically dead. True leisure requires being conscious of your leisure. If you need someone to tell you the position of your own body, how can you control your own time?

XV

I could spend a long time cataloging people who waste their lives playing games or baking in the sun. If your pleasures work you hard, you're not at leisure. No one doubts that those devoted to useless trivia (and there are many) are busily accomplishing nothing.

Scholars used to waste time asking: How many rowers did Odysseus have? Was the Iliad or Odyssey written first? Were they by the same author? Knowledge like this, kept private, doesn't improve you. Shared publicly, it makes you annoying rather than learned.

This empty enthusiasm for useless knowledge has infected us all. I recently heard someone discussing which general first did what obscure thing. Even if such facts involved meaningful history (and they don't), what good would knowing them do? Will they reduce anyone's mistakes? Restrain anyone's passions? Make anyone braver, more just, more generous?

One supposedly kind ruler thought it would be entertaining to have humans killed in creative new ways. Fighting to the death? Not enough. Torn apart? Not enough. Let them be crushed by massive beasts! Such things should be forgotten, lest some future tyrant learn of them and feel envious.

What darkness great success casts on our minds. That same ruler was later betrayed and killed by the lowest of servants, finally recognizing that his fearsome reputation meant nothing.

My friend Fabianus used to wonder whether it was better to pursue no studies at all than to get tangled in these.

XVI

Only those who give their time to wisdom are at leisure. Only they truly live. They don't just guard their own lifetime; they annex every age to their own. All past years belong to them.

Unless we're utterly ungrateful, we'll recognize that history's greatest thinkers were born for us. They prepared our way of living. They pulled beautiful treasures from darkness into light.

We're excluded from no age. We have access to all of them. If we want to transcend human limitations through expansiveness of mind, we have vast territories of time to explore. We can debate with Socrates, doubt with the skeptics, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics.

Nature allows us to share in every age. Why not leave this brief, fleeting moment and give ourselves to the past, measureless, eternal, shared with better people than ourselves?

Compare this to those who run around performing social obligations. When they've crossed every threshold, passed no open door, delivered greetings to distant houses, how few people do they actually reach in a city so vast? How many won't see them because of sleep, self-indulgence, or rudeness? How many pretend to be busy? How many escape through back doors? How many, hungover, barely remember their names?

The philosophers, by contrast, are always available. They never turn you away. They never leave you empty-handed. You can visit them day and night.

XVII

Philosophers won't force you to die, but all will teach you how. They won't diminish your years; they'll share their own. Conversation with them is never dangerous, friendship never risky, knowing them costs nothing. Take from them whatever you want. They won't prevent you from taking all you can hold.

What happiness awaits those who make philosophers their friends! They'll have advisors for every matter, great and small, whom they can consult daily. People who tell them the truth without insult, praise them without flattery, provide models for how to live.

We say we can't choose our parents; they're assigned by chance. But we can choose to be born into whatever intellectual family we want. There are households of the greatest minds. Choose which you'd like to belong to. You'll inherit not just the name but the actual property, and unlike regular inheritance, the more you share it, the larger it grows.

This opens the path to immortality. This raises you to heights from which no one is cast down. It's the only way to extend mortality, or transform it into immortality.

Honors, monuments, everything ambition builds: time demolishes and transforms it all. But wisdom's works are beyond injury. No age erases them. Each century adds to the respect they command.

The wise person's life is vast. They're not confined by the same limits as others. All ages serve them like a god. Time past? They hold it in memory. Time present? They use it. Time future? They anticipate it. Combining all time into one makes their life long.

XVIII

But for those who forget the past, ignore the present, and fear the future, life is brief and troubled. At the end, they realize too late that they were busy doing nothing.

Don't take their prayers for death as proof that life feels long to them. Their confusion drives them toward the very thing they fear; they pray for death because they're afraid of it.

And don't be fooled when they complain the day drags or the hours pass slowly. When their distractions fail them, they panic. They don't know what to do with themselves.

So they chase another preoccupation, finding all the time between now and the next thing unbearable. Like waiting for a big event, they want to skip over the days. Any delay of what they desire is long. But the actual enjoyment is short and fleeting, made shorter by their own fault. They jump from pleasure to pleasure, unable to stay with anything.

Their days aren't long but hateful. Yet their nights of drinking and partying seem impossibly short. They lose the day looking forward to the night, then lose the night fearing the dawn.

XIX

The pleasures of such people are anxious. In their happiest moments, the worried thought creeps in: "How long will this last?"

This feeling has made rulers weep over their own power. The magnitude of their success gave them no pleasure, but its inevitable end terrified them.

An arrogant king once looked over his vast army, so large it could only be measured, not counted, and burst into tears. In less than a hundred years, he realized, not one of these soldiers would be alive. Yet he himself would soon bring death to many of them, destroying in months those for whose hundredth year he wept.

Why are even their joys riddled with anxiety? Because those joys have no stable foundation. They fall apart as easily as they came together. If even their happiest moments are tainted with worry, imagine their bad times.

All the greatest blessings come with anxiety. The worst time to trust fortune is when it's most favorable. Maintaining success requires new success. Prayers that were answered require new prayers. Everything dependent on chance is unstable. The higher it rises, the further it can fall.

No one takes pleasure in what must inevitably collapse. So the life of those who work hard to acquire things they must work even harder to keep is necessarily wretched, not just brief. They struggle to get what they want, then anxiously guard what they've gotten, taking no account of time passing.

New preoccupations replace old ones. Hope breeds hope. Ambition breeds ambition. They don't seek an end to their wretchedness; they just change its subject.

Finished running for office? Now you're campaigning for others. Done prosecuting? Now you're judging. Done managing other people's wealth? Now you're consumed by your own.

Reasons for anxiety will never be lacking, whether from success or failure. Life drives on through one preoccupation after another. We pray for leisure but never achieve it.

XX

Remove yourself from the crowd. You've weathered more storms than your years deserve. Withdraw to a more peaceful harbor. Consider how many waves you've endured, how many storms in private, how many you've brought on yourself in public.

Your courage has been tested enough. See what it can achieve at rest. The greater part of your life has been given to work. Keep some for yourself.

I'm not calling you to lazy idleness or drowning your energy in mindless pleasures. That's not rest. You can find pursuits in peaceful solitude more important than anything you've done so far.

You manage the world's business as carefully as if it were a stranger's, as diligently as if it were your own, as conscientiously as if it were the public's. You win affection in a role where hatred comes easy.

Yet trust me: it's better to understand your own life than the affairs you manage. Your sharp intellect was meant for greater things than ensuring resources flow properly.

Consider how stressful your responsibilities are. You deal with human needs, and a hungry crowd submits to neither reason nor justice nor pleading.

Retire to pursuits that are calmer, safer, more important. Do you think checking shipments and preventing spoilage compares to sacred studies? To learning the nature of existence, what awaits your soul, where we go when we leave our bodies? To understanding what holds the universe together?

Leave the ground. Turn your mind's eye upward. While your blood still flows swiftly, while your knees are still strong, take the better path.

In this life await many good things: the love and practice of virtue, forgetfulness of destructive passions, knowledge of how to live and die, deep peace.

The position of all busy people is unhappy. Most unhappy are those who don't even labor on their own affairs, who must regulate their rest by someone else's sleep, their pace by someone else's walk, whose very loves and hates, the freest things in the world, are dictated by others.

If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them consider how small a fraction belongs to themselves.

When you see someone repeatedly take high office, when you hear a name famous in public, don't envy them. These things are bought at the cost of life.

For one year to bear their name, they'll waste all their own years. Life deserts some amid their earliest struggles, before they reach the peak of their ambition. Some claw through a thousand indignities to achieve the final honor, only to realize their entire effort amounts to an inscription on a tombstone. Some, even in old age, plan new ambitions as if still young, and fail as their bodies give out.

It's shameful when someone old dies in the middle of a trial, still trying to win sympathy for some case. It's disgraceful to die wearied by work rather than by living, to collapse while checking accounts, drawing a smile from the heir who's been waiting.

One old administrator, past ninety, was finally given retirement by the ruler. He had himself laid out on his bed and mourned by his household as if dead. The whole house grieved for their master's "death." The mourning only stopped when his job was restored.

Is it really such a pleasure to die while preoccupied? Many feel exactly this way. Their desire for work lasts longer than their capacity. They fight their own bodily weakness, considering old age a hardship only because it removes them from their duties. The law releases soldiers at fifty and senators at sixty, but people have a harder time releasing themselves.

While they plunder and are plundered, while they disturb others' peace and lose their own, while they make each other miserable, life remains without profit, without pleasure, without growth. No one keeps death before their eyes. No one refrains from distant hopes.

Some plan things beyond their own lives: elaborate monuments, public works, grand funerals. But such people's funerals should be conducted with the short candles used for children. For all their years, they never really lived.