On the shortness of Life - De Brevitate Vitae - Seneca

On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae) is a famous moral essay written around 49 AD by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger. He argues that life is not actually short, but that we waste a large part of it on meaningless things.

The most important lesson of On the Shortness of Life of course is that we need to value our time and avoid wasting it at all costs. Sure, we understand this intellectually but how many of us can actually say they truly live? As Maria Popova from Brain Pickings would observe, the essay is “a poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice.”