Life is short.
I want to have more time for myself.
The day flew and I did nothing.
Often we hear complaints that remind us of the shortness of time.
But what if the problem is not the time duration we have? What if we have enough time, but we waste most of it?
Instead of saying that life is short, Seneca states that we have enough time but we do not use it fully and purposefully.
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.
That brought me to observe the situation nowadays and to ask:
Even when we have time when we are not obliged to work and when we are done with the chores, where do we spend it?
We scroll social media endlessly, and then we ask ourselves why did we do that.
We get stuck in a loop of Youtube videos, that don’t actually interest us.
We end up laying on the couch and watching television, and we are confused about how we are not growing.
We long for more free time, but when we have it we use everything at our disposal to gain comfort.
But have we spent those times meaningfully?
It seems that the modern environment babysits us and gives us comfort, but it fails to connect us to meaning and purpose.
Therefore, we stop wasting and we actually gain time as we spend it more outside the comfort zone.