“No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives — worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives!” — Seneca, On the Brevity of Life
Seneca wrote this two thousand years ago and it reads like an observation about the current week.
We are careful with money. We track it, protect it, get angry when someone wastes it. We are careless with time. We hand it out freely, let it get consumed by things we did not choose and do not value, and rarely notice until a large amount of it is gone.
The asymmetry is strange when you name it. Money can be replaced. Time cannot. And yet.
I think about this on long mowing sessions — two hours on a machine with nothing to do but think. The audiobook goes in but sometimes the book stops mattering and what surfaces instead is an accounting of recent weeks. Where did it go? What was I actually doing? Did I choose any of that, or did I just drift through it?
The honest answer most weeks is: mostly drift.
Seneca’s indictment is not that we are lazy. It is that we are not paying attention. We guard what we can see — the bank account, the property line — and let slip what we cannot easily measure.
Paul tells the Ephesians to make the most of the time because the days are evil. The word underneath “make the most” is exagorazō — to buy back, to redeem. Time is not neutral ground. It is actively being consumed by something. The question is whether you are the one deciding what that something is.
Seneca and Paul are not saying identical things — their accounts of what time is for diverge considerably. But they arrive at the same diagnostic: we are not paying attention to where it goes.
The mower has about two hours left. I am trying to pay attention.