Where the time goes

Seneca's complaint is not that life is short in the abstract. It is that much of it is spent without being chosen: other people's business, anger, and postponement. The card paraphrases On the Shortness of Life. It is not a laboratory measurement of a day, and it is not a command to optimise every hour. A different Seneca sentence, from a named letter, is a checkable claim about a text. Keep those two kinds of sentence apart.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”

Seneca · Stoicism

deathmeaningself

Paraphrase or translation

Meaning & application

Mini check

"Seneca's Letter 13 says we suffer more often in imagination than in reality." What kind of claim is this?

It reports what Letter 13 contains, which can be checked.It is only a mood, and there is nothing in it to look up.It commands someone to act, and it does not report a fact.It predicts how your own coming week is going to feel.

Try it today

Note one hour you spent without choosing it, and one hour you did choose.

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