Argument 2: The Stewardship of Time and the Art of Living in the Present
Following the foundational argument that our inner mind is the only true domain of our control, Seneca presents a second, intensely practical and urgent thesis that serves as the engine for all Stoic practice: time is our sole, true possession, and it is the most precious yet most squandered of all human assets. For Seneca, the vast majority of humanity lives in a state of self-inflicted poverty, not of money or property, but of time. We allow it to be stolen by others, we give it away carelessly, and we let it slip through our fingers unnoticed, all while planning for a future that is completely uncertain. The art of living a wise and virtuous life, therefore, is inseparable from the art of managing time. This involves a radical reorientation toward the present moment. The goal is to stop preparing to live and to actually live, which Seneca defines as taking possession of today, treating each day as a complete and whole life in itself. By doing so, we not only make the best use of our finite existence but also liberate ourselves from the twin tyrants of a regretful past and an anxious future, achieving a state of tranquil completeness regardless of our lifespan’s length.
To grasp the full weight of Seneca’s argument, we must explore his diagnosis of how we lose our time, his reasoning for why this loss is the ultimate tragedy, the psychological mechanism behind this carelessness, and finally, his profound and actionable solution: to live each day as if it were our last, not in a spirit of morbid finality, but of joyful completeness.
Seneca opens his entire collection of letters with this very theme, signaling its primary importance. In Letter I, he writes to Lucilius not as a distant philosopher but as an urgent accountant of life itself: “Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius – set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.” Here, he immediately identifies the three ways we are dispossessed of our only true property. Some moments are “torn from us” when we allow the demands of others—employers, social obligations, trivial requests—to take precedence over our own well-being and purpose. Other moments are “gently removed,” filched away by our own lack of attention, by procrastination, and by idle pursuits that we drift into without conscious decision. Finally, some moments simply “glide beyond our reach,” lost to the inexorable and silent passage of existence. Of these, Seneca declares, “The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness.”
This carelessness stems from a fundamental error in valuation. We are, Seneca notes, meticulously careful with our money and property, yet extravagantly wasteful with our time. “What fools these mortals be!” he exclaims in Letter I, “They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning… but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.” This is the heart of the diagnosis: we fail to recognize that time is a non-renewable resource. A lost fortune can be regained; a lost friend can be replaced (though never perfectly); but a lost hour is gone forever.
The primary symptom of this temporal poverty is the habit of perpetual postponement. We are always preparing to live, but never actually living. In Letter CI, Seneca recounts the sudden death of his friend Cornelius Senecio, a man who, “during the very realization of financial success,” was snatched away. Seneca uses this tragedy to expose the madness of our forward-looking plans: “O what madness it is to plot out far-reaching hopes! To say: ‘I will buy and build, loan and call in money, win titles of honour, and then, old and full of years, I will surrender myself to a life of ease.'” This constant orientation toward the future is, for Seneca, the definition of a foolish life. In Letter XXIII, he quotes Epicurus approvingly: “‘They live ill who are always beginning to live.’ It is because the life of such persons is always incomplete. But a man cannot stand prepared for the approach of death if he has just begun to live.” We exist in a state of constant preparation, as if life were a dress rehearsal for an event that never arrives.
What is the root cause of this universal and tragic mismanagement of time? Seneca identifies it as a profound and pervasive failure to internalize our own mortality. We act as if our time is infinite because we push the thought of our finitude to the furthest corners of our mind. Seneca’s corrective is not to dwell on death morbidly, but to understand it rationally as a continuous process, not a singular, distant event. In a startling reframing in Letter I, he writes: “For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.” Death is not waiting for us at the end of the road; it is the road we have already traveled. Every moment that passes is a moment consumed by death.
He develops this idea with even greater force in Letter XLIX: “we do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us… The very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out.” This perspective is designed to shock us into a new appreciation for the present. If we are dying daily, then the present day is not merely another entry in an endless ledger; it is a precious, unrecoverable fragment of a rapidly diminishing whole. This recognition is the necessary catalyst for change. Without it, we will continue to be careless, to postpone, to live for a tomorrow that is never guaranteed.
Having diagnosed the problem and its cause, Seneca offers a powerful and elegant solution: seize the present day and live it as a complete life. This is the practical core of his teaching on time. “Hold every hour in your grasp,” he urges in Letter I. “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s.” This practice culminates in the famous Stoic discipline of treating each day as a self-contained unit of existence. In Letter CI, he writes: “Let us balance life’s account every day. The greatest flaw in life is that it is always imperfect… One who daily puts the finishing touches to his life is never in want of time.”
This idea of “putting the finishing touches” on life each day is not about a frantic rush to tick off a list of accomplishments. It is a qualitative, not a quantitative, measure. It means living with such intention, virtue, and self-awareness that if the day were to be one’s last, the life could be considered whole and complete. The goal is to be able to say, as the Syrian governor Pacuvius did in his bizarre daily ritual, “I have lived!” (Letter XII). Seneca encourages Lucilius to adopt this sentiment with a good and joyful motive, to go to sleep each night with the calm satisfaction of having lived a full life. This transforms one’s relationship with the future. If today is complete, then tomorrow, should it come, is a pure gain, a “bonus.” The person who lives this way “is secure in his own possession of himself, who can await the morrow without apprehension.” This is the ultimate freedom. It shatters the chains of anxiety that bind the future-oriented person, who is forever a slave to hope and fear, never truly at rest in the present.
This philosophy of time directly challenges the conventional valuation of life based on its length. For Seneca, quantity is an “indifferent” external, a gift of Fortune. Quality, however, is a matter of virtue and is within our control. In Letter LXXVII, he uses the powerful analogy of a play: “It is with life as it is with a play, – it matters not how long the action is spun out, but how good the acting is. It makes no difference at what point you stop. Stop whenever you choose; only see to it that the closing period is well turned.” A short life lived well is infinitely superior to a long life lived poorly or carelessly.
The measure of a life’s fullness is not the number of years passed, but the attainment of wisdom and virtue. “A life is really long if it is a full life,” he writes in Letter XCIII, “but fullness is not attained until the soul has rendered to itself its proper Good.” The man who lives eighty years in idle distraction has not lived long; he has simply “been a long time dying.” In contrast, the person who lives a shorter span but achieves virtue, who sees the “true light” and flourishes, has lived a complete existence. Their life is not incomplete; only their age is. This is the profound consolation Seneca offers against the fear of an untimely death. By focusing on the quality of each day, we make the total quantity of days irrelevant to our happiness. The happy life is a state of being, not a destination at the end of a long road. It can be achieved in a short time, because, as he argues, “in the slightest possible moment of time virtue completes an eternity of good” (Letter XCII).
In essence, Seneca’s argument on time is a call to a more intense and conscious form of existence. It is a spiritual discipline grounded in the stark reality of our mortality. It asks us to stop being passive passengers on the river of time, being carried along by the currents of convention and distraction. Instead, it demands that we become active pilots, seizing the tiller of the present moment. We must conduct a daily audit of our time, recognizing it as our most valuable, non-negotiable asset. This requires vigilance against the thieves of time—both the external demands of others and the internal habits of procrastination and inattention. The psychological fuel for this vigilance is the constant awareness of death, not as a source of fear, but as a source of urgency and appreciation. By embracing the idea that we “die daily,” we are inspired to “live daily.” This practice of living each day as a whole, of finding completeness in the present, dissolves our anxieties about the future and frees us to pursue the only goal that matters: the cultivation of a virtuous and unshakable soul. It is the practical method by which the abstract ideal of the Stoic sage is brought down to earth and made achievable, one day at a time.