“We don’t have too little time, but we waste much of it.” Seneca wrote this almost two thousand years ago, yet it could have been written last night, while you were scrolling your phone wondering where the day had gone.
In his treatise De Brevitate Vitae (“On the Shortness of Life”), Seneca argues something we still struggle to accept today: the problem isn’t how much time we have, but how we spend it. We’re not short on time — we waste it on things that don’t really matter, we keep postponing it, we hand it over to distractions that make us feel busy without actually taking us anywhere.
Two thousand years later, research seems to prove him right. Ashley Whillans, a professor at Harvard Business School, analyzed data from over 2.5 million people and found that around 80% of working adults in the United States feel chronically “time poor” — a feeling that weighs on daily well-being even more than unemployment does. It’s not (only) about how many hours we have, but about how we choose to live them.
What does this mean in practice? That it’s worth stopping, every so often, and asking not “how much time do I have today” but “what am I actually giving it to”. Seneca put it bluntly: many people live as if they had endless time ahead, and only realize how much they’ve wasted when it’s too late to make up for it. You don’t need to fill every minute of the day — you need to choose, consciously, what to give it to: a call to someone you love and haven’t heard from in too long, a moment of silence before falling asleep, that project you’ve been postponing for months just because “there’s never a good time”.
A small stoic exercise to try tonight: at the end of the day, look back at the hours you lived and ask yourself which ones stayed with you, which ones left you with something, and which simply slipped away. Not to judge yourself, but to better shape tomorrow.
You don’t need more hours in the day. You need to choose better how to live the ones you already have. It’s a thought as old as Stoic philosophy, yet rarely has it felt more relevant than in these days of notifications, deadlines, and packed schedules.
Sources
- Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae, Ch. I (1st century AD)
- Ashley Whillans, Harvard Business School — “time poverty” research; Whillans et al., “Buying Time Promotes Happiness”, PNAS, 2017
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