You’ve said it, I’ve said it, everyone says it all the time: “I don’t have time.”
We don’t have enough time to work out. We don’t have time to cook well. We don’t have time to journal or meditate. We don’t have time to build our business or pursue our side project. We don’t have time to read the book. We don’t have time to learn the skill. We don’t have time to invest. We don’t have time to see our friends.
Here’s the thing. A guy figured out this exact excuse was a lie almost 2,000 years ago. His name was Seneca. He was a Stoic philosopher in the Roman Empire. And he wrote a letter to his friend, Paulinus, a Roman official responsible for the grain supply of Rome, that basically says: stop blaming your life for being short. Your life is not short. You’re just giving it away for free.
He wrote that in the year 49, but it’s very accurate and applicable to our life today. And I want to break down this wonderful essay full of wisdom, “On the Shortness of Life”, where he tells us that life is not truly short, but we make it short by wasting it.
Seneca starts with the complaint everyone makes: life is too short. Life ends just when we’re ready to finally live it. He says it’s completely wrong. The problem is not the amount of time we have, it’s how badly we spend it. Life is long enough if you know what you’re doing with it.
It’s the same thing as money when you think about it. Some people get a small paycheck and can save a lot of money to invest it or to build a business. Other people have a high salary and blow it every month by buying luxury cars, bags, or trips to 5-star hotels. The amount of money we have doesn’t really matter. What matters is who’s managing it and what we do with it.
Time works the exact same way. A long life can be wasted, and a short one can be lived to its fullest. So we’re not short on time, we’re just mismanaging the time we have.
Here’s the proof.
We don’t have time to work out, but we have 2 hours to scroll on TikTok. We don’t have time to read a book, but we have time to rewatch a Netflix show we’ve already seen twice. The hours exist, but we’re just spending them somewhere else.
Also, Seneca says most people are not actually living. They’re just busy. And people mistake busyness for meaning. We’re active, important, admired, and exhausted. But our time is not really our own. We go from meeting to meeting, and appointment to appointment. We have to schedule our friends in 3 weeks from now.
It’s back-to-back calendar blocks with no white space, because if we have an empty calendar, it feels like we’re failing. It feels like we’re not busy enough. We’re not cool and interesting enough because we don’t have too many duties, activities, or friends scheduled. We’re saying “I’m just so busy” like it’s a personality trait.
Some of my friends from university were like that, and I decided to cut them off because I needed to chase them to hang out with them. One of my friends, I used to see her for 30 minutes on Tuesday evenings, between work and her yoga class. And it was only once every 2 months. Another friend, I remember texting her in June, suggesting we plan a weekend together that summer. She told me she was busy the whole summer, and she might be available on September 23 because her plans for that weekend hadn’t been confirmed yet. That was my best friend.
And a lot of people are like that. Being busy feels like being productive. It gets us compliments. People tell us, “Wow, you’re always doing so much.” So it makes us feel important. We’re praised by other people.
But we don’t necessarily live just because our calendar is full. Because it doesn’t matter how much you’re doing if none of it is yours. If none of your time belongs to you, then your life is spent by other people. We live only when our time is carefully managed and directed toward what really matters.
We’re very protective of our money or property, but we’re not protective of our time. If someone tries to steal money from us or our belongings, we notice. We get mad, and we say something. Because we value our money and our property. And we protect them. But our time? We hand it over without a fight. We don’t value our time at all.
How much time do we spend with people we don’t even care about? People we won’t remember in 6 months. How much time do we spend having fights we didn’t need to have? How much time do we spend gossiping about other people’s lives instead of living our own? How much time do we spend on social media looking at the lives of people we don’t even know? How much time do we spend thinking about things that don’t even matter and that will never happen?
We would never let someone walk into our house and take our money off the dresser. But we let people, apps, and bad habits take our time constantly, and we don’t even flinch. Time is the one thing we can never get back. We can always make more money or buy new things. But we can never get the days that we’ve lost. We’re doing everything backwards.
Obviously, I’m not saying that every obligation is bad. I’m not saying that we should selfishly withdraw from all duties. But what I am saying is that we need to start guarding our hours the way we guard our money and property.
Seneca also says people live like they’re going to live forever. We push our real life to later. We say we’ll really start once we lose the weight. We’ll enjoy our life once we make X amount of money. We’ll start dating seriously once we figure things out. We will basically start living once all conditions are finally right. And we treat our current self as a rough draft. The real version of us — the confident one, the free one, the one who finally does the thing — always lives in the future. Never right now.
And I’ve been guilty of that for so many years. I’ve always thought that my life hadn’t really started, that I was doing preparation work. I felt like it was just a warm-up for my real life. And that my real life would start once I achieved XYZ. But the problem is that it’s a never-ending race because once we hit the goal, there’s a new goal. And it keeps on going forever.
Also, we say later, but until when? Because we’re not even guaranteed a later. A lot of people wait till retirement to start living their life. They spend 40 years of their life basically just working. Being miserable. And never having time or energy to do anything. And they say, “I’ll do this or that when I retire”, “I’ll travel”, “I’ll join a club”, “I’ll start this side project”, and so on. But who said everyone is going to live until retirement? It’s not guaranteed.
And when we do, our health is diminished. In our 70s, we don’t have the same energy, and we’re not as healthy as in our 30s. We have less physical stamina, we start having body pain or all kinds of health issues one after the other. And if it’s not us, it might be one of our loved ones. So, to reserve the best part of our life for the leftover years is such a wrong calculation.
The present is the only time we actually get to use. Not the future, not the past. Right now. Every time we postpone living to some improved future version of ourselves, we’re skipping the only part that was ever real. We don’t need to become a different person to start living well. We just need to stop postponing our life to a version of us that doesn’t exist yet.
So once we reclaim our time, what do we do with it? Seneca says that idleness is not the same as leisure. A person can be unproductive and still not be free. A lot of people waste their time with pleasure, luxury, drinking, vanity, and entertainment. That’s not being free either.
When we’re bedrotting and scrolling for hours, we’re not being free even if we chose the activity ourselves. We’re just numbing and avoiding life. And many young people do this, bedrotting is a real thing. It’s often framed as recovery or as a funny thing to do, but it’s often withdrawal, avoidance, and refusal to live their real life.
Some people might have a reason for it. They might feel depressed or hopeless. But the solution is not to collapse. Because nobody is coming to live our life for us. We’re responsible for building our income, our skills, our health, and our relationships. Numbing just delays the discomfort we were trying to avoid in the first place.
It’s the same thing with partying every weekend, drinking, and having casual sex. It’s also empty pleasure and avoidance of life. It just makes time disappear carelessly so we don’t have to take care of more important things.
That’s the difference between hedonistic pleasure and true leisure. True leisure requires possession of oneself. It makes you grow as a person. It’s reading, dancing, playing music, learning a new skill, crafting your art, or practicing your sport.
The basic distinction is this: after you do the thing, do you feel more like yourself, or less? When we watch Netflix for 7 hours in bed without taking a shower, in general, we feel less like ourselves. Same thing when we scroll on TikTok for 3 hours straight. But when we learn a new skill, or we practice our craft, we feel more like ourselves. And we even feel like a better version of ourselves than the version who started the activity because we learned something while practicing.
Now, some people are gonna say that when they watch a movie or watch videos on TikTok, they learn new things. Fair enough. But it’s still knowledge that is trivial and only feeds vanity. Like how to do a perfect blow-out or how to DIY a dresser. It’s not knowledge that improves your soul. It’s not knowledge that really makes you better as a person. Also, you’re passive. You’re not actively engaged in the activity.
Finally, Seneca says most people are scared to look back at their own life, because their past is full of wasted time, and looking at it feels bad. So they avoid it. They stay busy so they never have to reflect on it and course-correct.
But someone who’s lived on purpose can look back without flinching. Their past is not something to avoid. It’s something they own. They can look back without shame, confusion, or regret. Their memories are not a burden but a treasury.
And that’s why most people are afraid of death. Because they didn’t live enough. Because they wasted so much time. They don’t want to die now because there’s so much they want to do, and they haven’t done yet.
So here’s my final message: you do not need a longer life as much as you need a less wasted one. Stop postponing life. Stop letting other people and trivial desires waste your time. Claim your time while it is still yours. A Soveryn doesn’t say, “I don’t have time.” She asks, “What am I currently doing with my time, and how can I manage it better?” Because if the answer doesn’t serve her, she takes her time back.
Here’s what that looks like this week: look at your calendar. Cut one thing that belongs to someone else’s expectations, not your actual goals. Pick one plan you’ve been postponing forever and do a small piece of it today. Not when you’re ready, today. Do it right now after you finish this article. And if you can’t, write it on your to-do list for later. Also, notice one thing you call rest or pleasure that actually leaves you feeling worse. Replace it with something that actually recharges you. Stop measuring your life by how busy you look. Start measuring it by how much of it you actually chose and how much of it serves you.
A Soveryn isn’t the busiest woman in the room. She’s the one who can tell you exactly why every hour of her week is spent the way it is. Your life isn’t short. It’s yours. So start acting like it.