Your greatest asset is your time: Stoic lessons on how not to waste it
Notes on giants - Number 18
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🏷️ Categories: Time.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
If we saw someone burning a pile of cash, we’d think they were insane.
Why don’t we say the same about someone mercilessly burning through their time?
Everyone is obsessed with earning more money.
With investing it.
With protecting it.
With multiplying it.
But… who is equally obsessed with protecting their time?
There’s something far crazier than burning a pile of cash: wasting our one truly non-renewable wealth—time.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca made it clear more than 2,000 years ago:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”
And he was right.
We live on autopilot, jumping from notification to notification, meeting to meeting, commitment to commitment. We are busy. Constantly busy. Maybe busier than at any other point in history. But we are not living.
So how do we escape this black hole that devours our time?
That’s what I want to talk about today—how to reclaim the time that belongs to you.
And yes, how to use your time as if your life depended on it.
Because it does.
The Illusion of Infinite Time
Do you know the greatest mistake you can make?
Acting as if you will live forever.
We are experts at postponing. We say, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” And that “tomorrow” becomes weeks. Years. Decades. Until suddenly (and without warning) life grants no more extensions. Time is the most valuable and underrated resource—what a paradox.
There are 3 reasons why we fall into the paradox of wasting time:
It cannot be stored or recovered. You can save and regain money, but never time. It slips away no matter what you do.
It is intangible. You can’t see how much is left. This is the same reason people overspend with credit cards but not with cash—the loss feels less real. And so, we overspend our time the same way.
You don’t know the total amount. You always know how much money you have. But you will never know how much time you have left. The lack of a precise number makes it feel limitless.
Seneca said it best:
“Hold every hour in your grasp. Seize today’s task. While we postpone, life speeds by. Nothing is ours except time.” — Seneca
How modern his words sound, right? Yet he said them 2,000 years ago.
If you don’t take control of your minutes today, someone else will do it for you. As Seneca warned, “seize today’s task.” Life doesn’t wait. And procrastination is burning time—worse than burning money.
“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.” — Seneca
Use your most precious resource wisely.
How We Lose Our Life Without Noticing
There are many ways to die. The most common is called “being busy.”
Think about it: productivity keeps increasing, yet we remain just as busy.
“The busy man is busy with everything but living.” — Seneca
Seneca saw this 2,000 years ago. Imagine what he would say now… It’s the paradox of productivity. Technology reduces the time needed for tasks, but also changes what we consider “enough” (Nam, 2014; Stephens, 2007). In general, people would rather work the same hours and produce more than work less and produce the same.
Money has become more valuable than time.
And outside of work, it’s the same. We’ve been taught that the fuller our calendars, the more successful we are. But being busy is not the same as moving forward. Doing more doesn’t mean living better.
How many times have you finished a packed day of tasks and felt empty?
Productivity without direction is just movement (in circles). What matters is not how much you do, but why you do it. That’s the question almost no one asks: Are your actions bringing you closer to what you value? To what you love? Or are you just following the script?
Living intentionally is not about doing more.
It’s about limiting yourself to what gives meaning to your life.
Otherwise, you’ll be like a traveler speeding ahead—toward nowhere.
Waiting and Waiting
Waiting for the perfect moment. Waiting to have more clarity. Waiting for more free time, more money, more experience. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And meanwhile? Life keeps passing by. The future will never arrive the way you expect.
Seneca is crystal clear:
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”
Expectation is one of the greatest thieves of time.
It robs us of the present with the promise of a more comfortable tomorrow. But that tomorrow will never be as perfect as you imagine. And while you wait, today slips away unused. The solution is to act.
If I had waited until everything was perfectly clear before starting to write, I’d still be thinking about the name of this newsletter… Start. Life is built along the way.
“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”
Do what you can with what you have today. The future will take care of itself.
The False Success That Makes Us Poor
We’ve been sold the idea that success is about accumulating: achievements, titles, money, things. But no one talks about the invisible cost: time. And often, it costs more than we’re willing to pay. Because the time spent obtaining something is also time you stop living.
Seneca offers a brutal reflection on this:
“Life is not only short but also miserable for those who gain with great effort what they must maintain with even greater effort.”
Is it worth it? Is that promotion worth the sleepless nights, the constant anxiety, the zero time with people you love? Is that online reputation worth the price of your inner peace? Is that frantic pace worth trading your life for a label of success?
Real success is being rich in time, not in money or fame.
The richest person is the one who can decide to whom and to what they dedicate their time. That is freedom. Everything else is just well-disguised slavery. As Seneca said, victims of a short and miserable life.
“Life is long enough, but when it is squandered in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final urgency to realize it has passed away before we knew it was passing.”
This single reflection changed my life completely. And you—what does it make you think about? Your time is your life. Protect it.
As Seneca would say, existing is not the same as living. Choose the latter.
✍️ Your turn: What changes could you make to live more of your time with intention?
💭 Quote of the day: “The busy man is busy with everything but living.” — Seneca.
See you next time! 👋
📚 References
Seneca, L. A. On the Shortness of Life.
Truth
This landed with painful clarity this morning. Thank you for the reminder — timely, in more ways than one.
We often speak about time as if it's abstract — hours, weeks, to-do lists. But what we’re really talking about, if we dare to go deeper, is death. The fact that we won’t always be here. And yet, somehow, we live as if we’re immortal — knowing full well that we’re not.
I remember reading The Five Regrets of the Dying by the Australian palliative care nurse — I must have loaned it out because I can't find it now. But it marked me. And it aligns with what Seneca speaks to in Letters from a Stoic, and what Muggeridge wrestled with when writing on the prospect of death. Not to paralyse us with morbidity, but to reorient us. To strip away the illusion that we have forever to figure things out.
When death becomes a compass, not a threat, we begin to measure moments differently:
The good ones become more luminous, because we know they're fleeting.
The painful ones become more survivable, because we remember they too are brief.
Time, in this frame, becomes not just a resource, but a reverent lens. It exposes the lie that our worth is in status, wealth, or even the relationship — because those only gain value through the lens of finitude. And even health, that elusive modern grail, only matters if it is aligned with presence.
If we are lucky enough to reach the end of our lives with the breath to reflect, what will matter most is the meaning we chose to give it. And whether we shaped that meaning with awareness of the gift — and the expiry — of time.