20 centuries ago, a man from Cordoba who had been quaestor, praetor, senator and consul of Rome and tutor to Emperors sat down to write a small treatise on the brevity of life. That was where he wrote that “it is not that we have little time to live, but that we waste a lot.”
That phrase has spanned decades and decades, sticking in the minds of thousands of people and illuminating their lives.
Or, simply, filling out internet pages that we have learned to consume as if it were any other entertainment product.
A very popular one, by the way. In recent months, the Internet has been filled with Seneca quotes. The head of this report is one of them, but not the only one (“If you want to find true happiness, do not look for it in the great or the new, but in the serenity that simplicity brings.“, “there is no favorable wind for those who do not know where they are going“, “It is not that we have little time to live, but that we waste a lot“, etc, etc. ). And it’s curious…
Does it make sense to go back to types from 2,000 years ago to solve our modern-day problems?
And surprisingly it may be so. That’s what Philosophy professor Christopher Gill asked himself a few years ago.What if all that philosophical gossip goes further? “To what extent can we moderns recognize in these essays a plausible response to mental illness?” he asked.
His answer, after studying Stoics and Aristotelians, is that Seneca’s texts; but, in general, these “philosophical essays were designed to function as a psychological analogue of the ancient medical regime.” What we would call today “lifestyle management” or “preventive medicine.”
And, therefore, beyond the ‘pop philosophy’ of recent years, it is possible to find something of value in all those classic texts.
Some of value, but not everything. In 1965, when she entered the Chinese Academy of Traditional Medicine, chemist Tu Youyou entered into a very long race to analyze each and every one of the remedies that the ancient Chinese civilization had been selecting.
Most of them were pure pseudoscience, of course. A mixture of superstition, credulity and placebo. However, hidden among the trickery, there were real gems. The best example is the artemisinina revolutionary treatment against malaria. A treatment that earned him the Nobel Prize in 2015.
It was sold like a Nobel Prize for traditional medicine, yes; but in reality, it was a Nobel for the slow work of screening, testing and discarding by the Ningbo scientist. That is what should be done with the practical philosophy of the Greeks and Romans.
And, in this case, it seems that Seneca was right. First of all, because we have systematic biases that they push us to postpone and waste time. Secondly, because much of the “lost time” is not even conscious: it is pure “cognitive friction” (interruptions, multitasking, attention waste, etc.). And finally, because, according to available evidencewhen we reduce the lack of time, well-being increases.
That is to say, it is not so much that we lack time as that we do not have a “well-lived” life.
How do we fit all this together? Well, very good. Because “all this”, moreover, fits into the general idea not only of Seneca’s pamphlet in which it appears; but in the general outline of Stoic philosophy.
And it is worth remembering that under all the naturalistic scaffolding of the philosophy of the old Stoics there was, above all, an ethical question: an imperative to live in accordance with nature (a, by the way, very rationalist vision of nature).
In this sense, the Stoics they used to pay attention to what the human being could or could not do: since you have limited control over the length of your life, you must focus on how you live it; They told us while they invited us to order our behavior through moral criteria by dint of attention and peace of mind.
Image | Fabio Comperelli | Prado Museum
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In Xataka | What is Stoicism, the Greek philosophy from 2,000 years ago that has become fashionable again today
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