Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from never being able to say what, exactly, all the doing was for.
A busy day starts with urgency. You have to answer a slew of messages, make decisions about what to do with the next task, reassure those around you, and complete several tasks, as well as wait for just one more piece of information. You fill up your calendar with the things you have to accomplish; you empty your inbox; then your email inbox fills again. You go to bed each night with the knowledge that you were busy, but with no sense of living. Have you felt like this?
Two thousand years ago, Seneca identified this condition. Although he lived in Rome at a time when there were no smartphone notifications, shared online calendars, or economic systems designed to harvest people’s attention, he did have a huge number of legal commitments, a great deal of political activity, wealth accumulation, a large number of clients, and a social environment where everyone needed to impress each other. Many of these are similar today, after all we are still human beings!
So, his conclusion was that while people may have too many obligations and responsibilities, it is not the quantity of things being done which keeps them preoccupied and out of touch with themselves.
Seneca, in his “On the Shortness of Life”, makes the statement that has troubled many readers over the years:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but a lot of time that we waste.”
The possible interpretation of this comment can seem judgemental, yet it is most accurately interpreted as an opportunity for improvement. If you feel that your life is short, are you really lacking time, or are you letting other people’s pressure, vanity, fear and procrastination fill your time, before you have decided what it is for? To Seneca, the issue is that people do not own their time.
The full calendar is not the full life
Seneca’s critique is not a disdain of labour or effort; he had experienced first hand the pressures inherent in the imperial political system from within. He experienced exile, wrote under political pressure, witnessed a significant time of personal hardship that also gave him insight into how quickly duties requiring the utmost labour, could become burdensome with no choice whatsoever. His target was all the activity we use to substitute for productive purpose - busyness that masks purpose.
A packed calendar gives a view of the volume of work that may be considered important, urgent, necessary, or needed to be done; equally, there are those events, activities, or tasks on our calendars that only create the illusion of urgency, simply because we have never stopped to examine whether those items truly serve us. While both our level of movement and level of stillness are relevant, the primary distinction between the two is our chosen commitments and our default (automatic) occupations.
This is one reason why Seneca’s philosophy is much more stringent than a productivity system. Generally, a productivity system asks the question of whether the task has been completed, whereas Seneca asks whether that task has become muted and merely prevented you from achieving the life you desire.
Even if someone is extremely busy at work, that does not mean they are not putting off work that is important to them, such as accepting or facing a complicated or painful truth about themselves, taking the time to learn something thoroughly, not allowing themselves to develop a build-up of resentment through their inattention to taking time for self-care, restoring a relationship, fully attending to their children, or making an important decision (one that they had repressed under several layers of preparatory tasks).
A person’s calendar is not able to assist them with these questions. The only information it provides is that there has been time allocated to the respective activities.
Time is lost in more than one way
In his first letter to Lucilius, Seneca asks his friend to “gather and save” his time. He clearly distinguishes time that has been forced from us, time that has been filched away, and time that simply slips from our hands through carelessness.
This distinction is precise because not all lost time is our fault.
Some time is taken. Illness, financial necessity, caregiving, bureaucracy, crisis, and obligations imposed by institutions can claim hours that we did not freely give. If you follow a philosophy that treats every minute as a personal choice, well, you ignores the realities of unequal power and unavoidable duty.
Some time is given away. We accept a meeting because we fear seeming difficult. We answer immediately because we have trained others to expect constant access. We remain available to another person’s anxiety because we do not know how to draw a boundary without guilt. These choices may be understandable or even seen as generous. But they become costly when they occur our time by reflex rather than by judgement.
And some time simply leaks. It is dispersed through attention that never fully lands anywhere: a little resentment, a little browsing, a little rehearsing, a little comparison, a little preparation for a life that will supposedly begin once everything is arranged. This is the loss Seneca calls most disgraceful, and it is indeed, because carelessness can make us absent from the only life we are actually given! It makes sense, right? How much time we have spent in those “leaks”!
Just to clarify, Seneca’s point is not that every spare minute must be converted into achievement. He is just asking for an honest account. In other words:
Do you know where your time goes?
Do you know why you are spending it there?
Can you tell the difference between rest that restores you and activity that merely keeps you from meeting yourself?
Busy idleness
Seneca’s sharpest phrase is busy idleness.
He uses it to describe people whose days appear full even in leisure – I have been there. For example, people devoted to display, restless acquisition, elaborate consumption, trivial competition, and the anxieties of status. They may have withdrawn from formal work yet remain inwardly crowded. The reason they are not at leisure is because they are not present enough to possess their leisure, if you know what I mean.
Even if the examples are Roman, the structure is obviously familiar. Busy idleness is any activity that absorbs attention while leaving the person untouched by their own life. It can happen in an office, on a holiday, during a workout, at a dinner party, or in an immaculate routine designed to prevent silence.
This obviously does not make pleasure suspect. Seneca is not asking us to live without play, beauty, companionship, or recovery. He is only exposing a particular form of evasion: using the texture of life to avoid its substance.
You can be busy because your work is meaningful. You can be busy because another person needs you. You can be busy because a season is genuinely demanding. But you can also be busy because stillness might reveal that you have built a life around expectations you no longer believe in.
The question is not, “Am I busy?” The question is, “If the activity stopped, what would I be forced to notice?”
Urgency is not importance
The voice of Urgency persuades easily. It tells us that the newest demand is the biggest demand, that rapid response equals virtue, and that delaying reflection means we are acting responsibly.
There is also a legitimate form of urgency. For instance, when a parent is overwhelmed with responsibility and has no one available to help, then immediate support is needed. Similarly, deadlines can create consequences for those involved, and emergencies require swift action. Seneca does not recommend indifference when managing a real and immediate need.
On the other hand, manufactured urgency does exist. This type of urgency arises because an individual’s reputation is at stake. An individual worries that if they do not respond within one hour, their reputation will be diminished. Additionally, manufactured urgency can be caused by one’s habitual pattern of responding to everything received by email within minutes. Some people prefer to respond to ten small tasks rather than consider one larger question that has the potential to change the course of their lives.
Seneca does not suggest that we need to be slower in all situations. Instead, he recommends that we become more specific about what demands actually have a reason for being handled with speed.
To determine whether a demand warrants urgency, consider three key questions prior to acting.
First, would waiting result in a consequence?
Second, who prioritised the demand?
Third, what possible larger task would need to wait if I were to give in to it immediately?
These questions do not excuse us from fulfilling our responsibilities; rather, they protect us from mistaking another person’s pressure for our own judgement.
This distinction allows for proportionality. An unanswered message, while potentially uncomfortable for the receiver, is likely not consequential. A neglected conversation, on the other hand, can be both uncomfortable and deeply consequential. The sense of urgency cannot answer the question of which situation to act on, but provides clarity on which situation is best handled quickly and which situation may be left for a later time.
The life we keep postponing
In Letter 1, Seneca gives his friend a plain instruction: “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.”
This thought is an attack on the fantasy that the real work of life can safely be deferred until conditions become ideal.
We postpone the creative work until there is a clear weekend. We postpone the honest conversation until we understand every feeling. We postpone rest until nothing remains to be done. We postpone presence until the phone stops, the financial pressure eases, the house is organised, the body changes, the children are older, the career is settled.
Some preparation is wise, but postponement often borrows the language of preparation in order to avoid the risk of beginning.
Seneca’s reminder is uncomfortable because it removes the refuge of the future self. The future self will not be less frightened simply because the calendar has advanced. The person who avoids the difficult action now will usually find a more elaborate reason to avoid it later.
To lay hold of today’s task means to identify the smallest act that moves a central part of life from intention into reality. It may be sending the first message, opening the first page, asking for the appointment, declining the request, taking the walk without filling it with noise, or sitting quietly long enough to discover what the next task actually is.
The size of the act is not the point. The point is to stop using time as a waiting room for a life you have already begun to receive.
The Senecan time audit
Seneca does not try to offer an image of himself as an ideal individual with regards to time management; he states in Letter 1, “I cannot claim that I have never wasted any time”, but he does assert that he is able to establish or identify what he has wasted, why and how. This is a far more valuable benchmark when assessing one’s relationship with time as compared to guilt.
After the conclusion of any given day, take a few moments to complete an informal audit, and do not try to be punitive towards yourself, just provide a framework from which to compare expenditure to investment.
Start with the Necessary items of time management. A Necessary area will include: time spent performing your job duties, caring for others, taking care of your physical body, the time you dedicate to performing your genuine obligations, or time spent on people or things due to unforeseen circumstances. This is the framework of your life.
Next, look at the Chosen area of time management. This area will include: activities that you engaged in because of your values or beliefs, or that you have committed to or have an existing relationship, or that are part of your genuine resourcing of your life. Understand that Chosen time does not always have a positive connotation; in fact, a difficult conversation or a difficult practice may in fact reflect your strongest belief and most sincere commitment.
Next, identify what was dispersed. Where did time vanish without a clear decision? Do not reduce this category to screen use. Include rumination, performative availability, anxious preparation, resentful delay, and work extended beyond usefulness because stopping would require you to decide what comes next.
Finally, select one hour to reclaim in your following 24-hour cycle. Consider this hour an opportunity to return to a purpose in your life that is being neglected. Your purpose could be related to a project, a close personal relationship, a hobby, a big question in your life, a physical activity or a time of uninterrupted attention.
The success of your audit will be determined by the level of clarity it brings to and not the production of a perfect schedule. Be aware of this trap …
Leisure as the possession of yourself
The modern ideal of leisure is often escape: no demands, no discomfort, no one needing anything. But this is wrong …
Seneca’s idea is stronger. Leisure is the condition in which you can actually possess your attention and therefore your life.
This kind of leisure can exist in a short walk, an early morning hour, a thoughtful meal, a period of reading, a craft performed without display, or a conversation in which no one is trying to gain an advantage. It can also be absent from a luxury holiday if the mind remains governed by anxiety, comparison, and the need to be seen enjoying itself.
Senecan leisure is not laziness, and it is not the reward granted after all real work has been completed. It is the space in which we learn what work, rest, obligation, and ambition are for.
That is why the illusion of busyness is so costly. It is not that it just crowds the calendar. It prevents the kind of attention through which a person can tell whether their calendar belongs to them at all!
Seneca’s challenge is therefore to stop allowing urgency to choose the shape of a life by default. Some days will be crowded and some responsibilities will be immovable. But even within them, there remains a question that cannot be outsourced:
What deserves the next hour of the life I have been given?
By Dr Ioannis Syrigos
References
Vogt, Katja. “Seneca.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, substantive revision 2024. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca/
Seneca. Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1, “On Saving Time.” Translated by Richard Mott Gummere. Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_1
Seneca. On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae). Translated by John W. Basore. Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_shortness_of_life
Great reflection! Truly enjoyed it. All relevant information. Thank you