Value your time, the Stoic way

“The days are long but the years are short.”

Wise words, but they didn’t originate from the pen of the ancient Roman sage of Stoicism, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC- AD 65). A modern-day American author, Gretchen Rubin, coined the meme-ready phrase in her bestseller “The Happiness Project” to remind young, sleep-deprived, exhausted parents that in the blink of an eye, rambunctious toddlers become grown-up adults, with babies of their own. 

I’ve been pondering those words a lot lately to help me understand the elasticity of my own time on earth. We slipped so effortlessly back into our North Vancouver life again that I thought I must have imagined being away for five months in Costa Rica.

Baby boomers and baby huggers alike should take Rubin’s words as an important lesson. Time is our most precious, irreplaceable possession. It is not something to be squandered. Seneca, meanwhile, also had a few words to say on the value of time.

Of course, if he’d been distracted by a smart phone, social media and an endless breaking news cycle, it’s highly doubtful Seneca would have found time to write his famous “Moral Letters to Lucilius”. Continuous partial attention can bring down sages too. Luckily, he managed to stay focussed. 

His timeless wisdom, pun intended, is presented in “Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living” by the Sarajevo-based writer David Fideler. Time is only one of many subjects that he covers. There are also Stoic lessons on dealing with anger, adversity, anxiety, authenticity and more. 

Reading, or rather listening to “Breakfast with Seneca” on Audible on my early morning walks of my neighborhood, confirmed for me yet again, the power of a key overarching Stoic principle: 

Humans should not waste our time and bandwidth worrying about stuff we have no control over. 

That includes not sweating Donald Trump’s daily pronouncements or tweets from his reality game show television set in the White House. 

It also means focusing only on our own actions and choosing how to allocate our time, rather than being consumed by our lack of agency over it. The Stoics prioritize meaningful activities in keeping with one’s values over distractions. 

Modern day translation: Put down your phone, stop doom scrolling, and go out and do something virtuous for someone else. 

Anyone who’s been watching the HBO hit “The White Lotus” might also want to better understand the Stoic concept of amor fati. If you were paying close attention the other night, you might have caught that that was the title of the season finale. 

Amor fati literally translates from the Latin as “love of fate”. It means embracing everything that happens in life, including suffering and setbacks, as necessary for cultivating resilience. And, it’s impossible to control external events. 

The character played by the actress Aimee Lou Wood (spoiler alert) dies after being caught up in the fate of the love of her life Rick, played by Walton Goggins. The scene that plays out is a stark reminder that despite fretting in earlier episodes that bad luck comes in threes and she had already had two near-misses, Chelsea still couldn’t prevent her own death in the crossfire that ensued.

Some reviewers of the show’s finale tied the fatalist title to Buddhist teachings or the interpretations by the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, but it’s a one hundred per cent Stoic lesson. 

For as Seneca and his fellow sages constantly remind us, time marches on in all its impermanent glory, motivating us to value the fleetingness of it, and to make the most of every single moment. 

That’s good advice in any century.