Rating:🪨🐮
On the Shortness of Life is an essay by Seneca the Younger. It is quite short and approachable. I found it to be a mixed bag of a few timeless good-sounding ideas and a lot of near-nonsense.
Seneca was a stoic philosopher who lived from 4 BCE to 65 CE. He was wealthy and influential, working as a Senator, advisor and tutor to multiple Roman emperors. He lived in exile for a time, returned to power, then died of voluntary suicide after being ordered to do so by Nero.
The essay covers a suite of recommendations on how to live, more often using examples of what not to do than examples of good living. Often in the same paragraph, I’d go from an opinion of “hmm, this sounds reasonable” to “wow, that’s one way to look at it…”.
For example:
No one knows less about living than a busy person: there is nothing about which it is more difficult to gain knowledge…one’s whole life must be spent in learning how to live, and this may surprise you more: one’s whole life must be spent in learning how to die.
Well put, I agree! But later in the same paragraph:
Believe me, it requires a great person and one who is superior to human frailties not to allow any of their time to be filched from them. It follows that their life is a very long one, because they devote every possible part of it to themselves; no portion lies idle or uncultivated, or in another person’s power. They find nothing worthy of being exchanged for their time, which they guard most grudgingly. They, therefore, have time enough. Whereas those who gave up a great part of their lives to public service do not have enough…Because all those who call upon them for help distract them.
Ah, so this is an argument in favor of selfishness? Avoid spending time doing work on behalf of others so you can live exactly how you’d like to and feel like you have enough time to, I guess, walk the gardens and ponder the meaning of virtue? I feel like I’ve met (and/or been…) this 22-year-old before.
To be fair, I feel like Seneca is writing this from his own perspective. He had extreme demands on his time and very little personal leeway. But to frame the correction of an imbalance in your own life as a virtue to be prioritized for all is odd.
There are some real banger select quotes, though:
Yet no one will give you back your years, no one will restore them to you again. Your life will run its course once it has begun, and will neither begin again or reverse what it has done. It will make no announcements, it will give you no warning of how fast it flies; it will move silently on.
I find this passage on wasting time valuing frivolous things both funny and relatable:
Would you call a person idle who expends anxious finicking care in the arrangement of their Corinthian bronzes, valuable only because of the mania of a few connoisseurs? And who passes the greater part of their days among plates of rusty metal? Who sits in the palaestra (shame, that our very vices should be foreign) watching boys wrestling? Who distributes their gangs of fettered slaves into pairs according to their age and colour?
Who doesn’t sometimes find themself spending too much time pairing their fettered slaves! And also, singers should just talk:
What of those who devote their lives to composing, hearing, and learning songs, who twist their voices, intended by Nature to sound best and simplest when used straightforwardly, through all the turns of futile melodies; whose fingers are always beating time to some music on which they are inwardly meditating; who, when invited to serious and even sad business, may be heard humming an air to themselves? Such people are not at leisure; they are busy with trifles.
I find a lot of the arguments to fall apart due to the assumption of some common understanding of what rightness and virtue is. While I strongly believe in better and worse ways to live, and that ethical progress is real and important, I think it’s much more likely that the person who feels that they are “making a right judgement in all things” is probably overconfident at best. I’m not sure the self-assured nature with which oil executives and other sociopaths move through the world is indicative of their righteous judgement.
No insane person can be happy, and no one can be sane if they regard what is injurious as the highest good and strive to obtain it. The happy person, therefore, is one who can make a right judgment in all things. He is happy who in his present circumstances, whatever they may be, is satisfied and on friendly terms with the conditions of his life. That person is happy whose reason guides and informs all their behaviour.
This was why the ancients wished us to lead the highest, not the most pleasant life, in order that pleasure might not be the guide but the companion of a right-thinking and honourable mind. It is Nature that should guide us here: let our reason observe her and be advised by her. To live happily is the same thing as to live according to Nature. What this means, I will explain.
Who are these ancients? Where is Nature’s bible? He goes on to say that “Nature is vibing with what’s out there and deriving self confidence from it”:
In this way we obtain a strength and an ability which are united and allied together, and derive from it a kind of reason which never hesitates between two opinions, nor is dull in forming its perceptions, beliefs, or convictions…In contrast, slow and hesitating action are the signs of discord and lack of settled purpose. You can say, then, that the highest good is singleness of mind. Because where agreement and unity are, there must be virtue; it is the vices that are at war one with another.
Let our leaders never hesitate or second guess themselves, nor admit mistakes publicly or recognize tradeoffs. Not only does it demonstrate weakness, but it’s a sign that they’re out of tune with NatureGod. Thank the lord for our current leadership and all the great ways that’s going.
There’s some ideas that I feel I could very much get on board with if we could agree on some definitions up front. Is virtue going on animal safari and mimicking the lions? Is it reading ancient texts as gospel? Or is it a thoughtful exploration in good faith based on tangibles and intangibles of what does the most good for the most people?
But come! Let virtue lead the way: then every step will be safe. Too much pleasure is hurtful, but with virtue we need fear no excess of any kind, because moderation is contained in Virtue herself. That which is injured by its own extent cannot be a good thing. Besides, what better guide can there be than reason for beings endowed with a reasoning nature? So if this combination pleases you, if you are willing to proceed to a happy life in such company, let virtue lead the way, let pleasure follow and hang about the body like a shadow. Only a mind incapable of great things would hand over virtue, the highest of all qualities, to be a handmaid of pleasure.
There is at least good recognition of his own unfinished work. He doesn’t claim to have all the answers. When confronted with the claim that “You talk one way, and live another”:
I speak of virtue, not of myself, and when I blame vices, I blame my own first of all. When I have the power, I shall live as I ought to do. Spite, however deeply steeped in venom, shall not keep me back from what is best. That poison which you spatter on others, with which you choke yourselves, shall not hinder me from continuing to praise that life which I do not, indeed, lead, but which I know I ought to lead, from loving Virtue and from following after her, albeit a long way behind her and with halting gait.
Don’t worry, life isn’t all about striving for virtuous self possession, though!
We shouldn’t always keep the mind strained to the same pitch, but let it sometimes be relaxed by amusement. Socrates was happy to play with little children, Cato used to refresh his mind with wine after he had tired himself on affairs of state, and Scipio would move his triumphal and soldierly limbs to the sound of music, not with a feeble and halting gait, as is the fashion nowadays, but dancing as men did in the days of old on sportive and festal occasions – that is, with manly leaps – thinking it no harm to be seen so doing even by his enemies. Because wine washes away troubles and dislodges them from the depths of the mind, and acts as a remedy to sorrow as it does to some diseases.
Spot the difference:
On the other hand, rocks also feel neither fear nor sadness, nor do cattle, yet no one would call those things happy that cannot comprehend what happiness is.
Ok, this has just devolved into bad memes roasting Seneca. I think this essay is the sort of thing that you can derive a lot of meaning from if you don’t read it very literally and really keep in mind the time in which it was being written, but I don’t think it holds up very well today overall.