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March 30
Day 89/365: Seneca on wasting life
Logan
March 30, 2025
Welcome to The Stoic Ledger, a daily money meditation from one of the Stoic sages.
89/365: Seneca on wasting life
“How many have laid waste to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements—how little of your own was left to you. You will realize you are dying before your time.” – Seneca
Life is tossed away moment by moment. How we spend each moment determines the quality of our time here.
Grief, joy, desire, and amusement are staples of existence. But as Seneca notes, there’s not much left after you allocate your time to these. And one day when you take stock of what you have left, it’s often seen as too little too late.
However, it’s not the emotion that caused Seneca strife. Notice the adjectives that lead the words he used. It’s the excess, the unnecessary, of the emotion, not the emotion itself.
It is up to us to determine the appropriate allocation of our time, so that in our final days we rest well knowing we squeezed the right things out of life.
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