Thanks to this engaging interview, I came across this wonderful article on BrainPickings rounding up Roman philosopher Seneca's views on time.
Interestingly, in her interview, Popova says she pretty much hates Facebook, but keeps it live because some of her readers - I suspect, reading between the lines, to be mainly from South Asia - like to engage via that platform.
Extracts from the "Seneca on Time" article (emphasis mine):
Interestingly, in her interview, Popova says she pretty much hates Facebook, but keeps it live because some of her readers - I suspect, reading between the lines, to be mainly from South Asia - like to engage via that platform.
Extracts from the "Seneca on Time" article (emphasis mine):
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca
...Seneca cautions that we fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even though it is arguably our most precious and least renewable one: “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
...Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately
