Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

The argument in one paragraph

Seneca writes to his friend Paulinus, a busy public official, and starts from the complaint everyone makes: nature gives us too little time. He thinks the complaint has the wrong target, and most of the essay is a tour of where the time actually goes: to other people’s business, to leisure as frantic as work, to plans for a life that will begin at fifty or sixty. His remedy is leisure in the Roman sense, otium: time taken back from public business and given to your own mind, above all through philosophy, which lets you use the past, the present and the future instead of losing all three. He makes the case in twenty short chapters, mostly through examples, many of them funny, of people who are busy doing nothing.

Chapter by chapter

Chapter numbers are Stewart’s, and modern editions divide the text the same way, give or take a sentence. Every passage is his 1889 translation, checked word for word.

Chapters 1–2: the complaint and the reply

Seneca opens with the grievance in two famous forms: the physicians’ maxim that life is short and the art is long, and a complaint he credits to Aristotle, that nature lets some animals outlive us by centuries. Then he rejects both.

Chapter 2 opens with one of the essay’s best-known sentences, then lists where the years go: greed, useless diligence, wine, sloth, ambition that hangs on other people’s opinions, trade, soldiering and the service of great men.

“A is devoted to B, and B to C” describes a city where everyone is in someone else’s service. It translates easily: your morning goes to your manager’s priorities, hers to her director’s, and nobody in the chain gets an hour of their own. The chapter closes on people who are offended when a great man keeps them waiting. He will see them eventually, Seneca says, and listen; they have never once made time to hear themselves out.

Chapter 3: the accounting of years

People will come to blows over a boundary line on their land, Seneca observes, and then lead others in to take over their lives. So he runs an audit, asking a man of a hundred to add up where the century went.

Put a modern week through the same list and the headings barely change: bills and paperwork, everyone who needs something from you, the arguments at home, and “running up and down the city on business,” now the commute and the errands. What remains is the life you actually lived, and it is shorter than your age.

The reason, Seneca says, is that we live as though we would live forever, and the day we hand to some person or errand may be our last. Then he quotes the plan he keeps hearing, leisure after fifty and no more public office after sixty, and asks what guarantee anyone has of reaching either birthday. He returns to the point in chapter 20, where his complaint is that no one keeps death before his eyes; the practice built on that idea is memento mori.

Chapters 4–6: the great men who wanted rest

A parade of the most successful Romans, each longing for leisure he never had. Augustus, who held the fortunes of nations in his hands, kept wishing for the day he could live for himself; Seneca quotes a letter of his to the Senate. Cicero, writing to Atticus, calls himself half a prisoner at his villa near Tusculum. Livius Drusus complained that he had never had a holiday, not even as a boy. None of them changed anything by complaining, Seneca notes. Once the words were out, they went back to the same life.

Chapters 7–8: the busy and the givers of time

Chapter 7 is about the busy, the occupati, Seneca’s word for people whose time is never their own. Other arts have teachers everywhere, he says, and some are simple enough for boys to learn and pass on. Living is the one that takes all of life to learn, and so is dying.

The ship in the gale is the busy life: years of weather, and no travel.

Chapter 8 makes the essay’s most modern observation.

When someone asks for a quick call, the two of you discuss the call, never the hour, because an hour has no weight and no price tag. Yet people who give their hours away as if they cost nothing, Seneca says, will beg a doctor on their knees for more of them once they are dangerously ill. He adds that if we could count the years ahead as we count the ones behind, we would spend them very differently. Since we can’t, the supply of unknown size is the one to handle most carefully.

Chapter 9: postponement and an uncertain future

Chapter 9 holds the essay’s most-quoted sentences. Seneca turns to people proud of their foresight, who labor today in order to enjoy life at some later date.

His complaint is that “they fit themselves out for life at the expense of life itself.” Postponement “takes away the present by promising something hereafter,” which is why “there is no such obstacle to true living as waiting.” The middle sentence names the mistake: “You dispose of that which is in the hand of Fortune,” meaning chance, and let go of what is in your own.

The sentence most people search for is the last one, “everything future is uncertain: live now straightway.” Online it usually appears in a modern wording built around the word uncertainty, from C. D. N. Costa’s translation for Penguin. That translation is still under copyright, so it isn’t reproduced here, but on this line it stays close to Seneca. His Latin says that all things to come in incerto iacent, “lie in uncertainty,” and ends with two words, protinus vive, “live at once.” Stewart’s “live now straightway” is the same command in Victorian English.

He doesn’t mean “live for the moment”: the pleasure-seekers of chapters 7 and 16 do little else, and he counts them among the busiest people of all. His target is the life kept on hold, the long-promised trip, the instrument in the closet, the dinner with your father, all waiting for things to calm down. The calm is in Fortune’s hands. Today is in yours.

He then quotes a line from Virgil’s Georgics about the best days of wretched mortals being the first to fly, and points out that the poet wrote “day,” not “age.” For using this chapter against everyday delay, see Stoicism and procrastination; for the worry that comes with not knowing, see the Stoics on worry.

Chapters 10–11: past, present and future

Chapter 10 divides life into three parts and asks which of them we actually possess.

Of the three, Seneca prizes the past, the one stretch of time Fortune can no longer touch. The busy lose it anyway: they have no leisure to look back, and some would rather not see what they did. The present runs off before they can grasp it, the future isn’t theirs yet, and so they end up owning almost none of their own lives. Seneca kept a daily look back himself, the nightly review he describes in On Anger (3.36); the free Evening Examination is modeled on it.

Chapter 11 is short and grim: old men praying for a few more years and swearing that, if they recover, they will finally live at leisure. Someone who used their time well, Seneca says, finds even a little of it plenty.

Chapters 12–13: busy leisure

Seneca’s busy people are not only lawyers and politicians. Some are busy on their days off.

His examples are very funny: the collector fussing over his bronzes, men who sit for hours at the barber’s and rage over a misplaced curl, and a man carried out of his bath who asked whether he was sitting down. Chapter 13 adds the trivia hunters, debating how many rowers Ulysses had. Today it might be the Saturday lost to reorganizing the garage, or a hobby run like a project with deadlines. Seneca’s verdict: “their very business is sloth.”

Chapters 14–15: time with the philosophers

Here the essay turns from the problem to the remedy. The only people truly at leisure, Seneca says, are those who give their time to philosophy, because they add the centuries before them to their own.

His imagined company includes Socrates to argue with and Epicurus, whose school opposed the Stoics, to rest with. None of these teachers, he adds, will ever be “engaged”: a dead author always has time for you. Chapter 15 goes on to say that you can’t choose your parents but can choose which family of minds adopts you, and that the wise person’s life is long because it takes in every time: the past through memory, the present through use, the future through anticipation.

Chapters 16–20: the preoccupied, and a letter to Paulinus

The last chapters return to the busy, then speak to Paulinus directly.

Chapter 16 notes a twist: the same people often find their days long. Left without business, they fret, and they would skip whole stretches of time to reach the next show if they could. In chapter 17 even their happiest moments carry the question of how long this can last. Chapters 18 and 19 urge Paulinus, who has run the grain supply as carefully as if it were his own money, to take back some of his time for himself; better, Seneca says, to know the accounts of your own life than those of the public grain. Chapter 20 ends on careers that swallow lives, men who spend all their years to have one year named after them as consul. Such people, he says, should be buried by torchlight, as if they had lived only a few days.

The best lines, verified

Each line is in a passage on this page, in Stewart’s 1889 translation, so you can read it in context.

Why the wording you know may differ

Many versions of these lines shared online come from modern translations, often C. D. N. Costa’s, usually without a translator’s name. Those translations are still under copyright, so this site quotes only Stewart, whose 1889 version is in the public domain. The differences are in the English, not the thought: Stewart writes long sentences linked by colons, and modern translators use shorter, plainer ones. The best-known version of chapter 1’s central sentence, about not having a short time but wasting much of it, is Costa’s; Stewart’s begins “We do not have a very short time assigned to us.”

For where the essay fits in a reading list, see Stoicism books.

Who it was for

The essay is addressed to Paulinus, and its last chapters tell us his job: he managed Rome’s grain supply, the office that kept the capital fed (chapters 18–19). He was probably Pompeius Paulinus, a relative of Seneca’s wife, Pompeia Paulina. A note in Stewart’s edition passes on the old view that he was her brother; others have suggested her father. Stewart heads the work as the tenth book of Seneca’s Dialogues.

The date is less certain. Chapter 18 refers to the death of the emperor Gaius (Caligula), so it was written after 41 CE, and it is most often placed around 49, the year Seneca was recalled to Rome from exile on Corsica (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). If so, he wrote it as he was being drawn back into public life himself, soon to be tutor and then adviser to Nero; see Seneca for the rest of his life. Either way, it is not a hermit’s rejection of the world. It is one capable man writing to another in a demanding job, and asking how much of his life is still his own.

What it asks you to change

Seneca doesn’t end with a method, but the essay implies several. Three fit into an ordinary week.

1. Run chapter 3’s audit on last week. Go through the days and ask the old man’s question: how many went the way you meant them to, when they were yours to arrange? Then write down who or what took the rest. The list is usually short and specific: the same two meetings, the same feed, the same errand done three times instead of once. The point is to find the leak, not to feel guilty. To see a whole life laid out in weeks, open the memento mori calendar.

2. Name the cost when someone asks for your time. Chapter 8’s complaint is that both sides of a request think about its purpose and never about the time. So say the time out loud before you agree: “That’s Thursday afternoon.” Plenty of requests deserve the yes. The difference is that you decide, instead of finding out later where the afternoon went.

3. Take one thing off “later.” Listen for the sentences in your own head that begin “once this project is over” or “when the kids are older.” Seneca’s question to each is the one from chapter 3: who guaranteed you the time? Then move whatever sits behind the sentence, or one piece of it, onto a date this week.

For more lines on time, from Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus as well, see Stoic quotes about time.

Read it free

Stewart’s translation is free on Project Gutenberg in his Minor Dialogues (eBook #64576 (opens in a new tab)), titled Of the Shortness of Life. It runs to about 10,500 words, less than an hour of reading. Two tips make it easier going. Read to the full stop, because his sentences run on through colon after colon. And skim chapters 4 to 6 and 13 on a first pass; they are full of Roman history, and the argument holds without them.