“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 have three glyphs at the bottom of every personal email I send.
X + ?
The X is an hourglass. Memento mori. You are going to die. Is this thing worth even part of what is left? Most things are not.
The + does double duty. One: am I adding anything beneficial — is this real progress or just motion. Two: it is also a cross. Stay rooted. Don’t drift off the only ground worth standing on while you’re trying to manage the inbox.
The ? is the last gate. Do I even need to have an opinion on this? Most of what passes through a day is asking for an opinion. Most of those requests do not deserve one.
Those three symbols sit at the bottom of every message because I needed something a Roman emperor and a New Testament epistle would both nod at, sitting where the noise is loudest.
I think about Seneca’s line on long stretches at the keyboard. There are days where I sit in a Teams meeting and watch the manager work himself into a lather about something that will not matter in a week. He yells, he course-corrects, he yells about the course-correction. I learned a long time ago to use the mute button. Put the call on mute, yell back at the computer for thirty seconds, come back calm, finish the meeting.
That is a kind of time stewardship that does not feel like time stewardship. It feels like a coping mechanism. But what it really is — the mute button protects the next two hours from being eaten by the last two minutes. Seneca would recognize the move. He spent a lot of years in Nero’s court.
The bigger threat is not the manager. The bigger threat is the version of me that takes that energy home and lets it sour the evening, sit at the dinner table, run loops in the back of my head while my wife is talking. That is the handing out my life to passersby Seneca named. The manager is the passerby. I am the one paving the way.
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 X is the hourglass. The + is what I’m actually adding, and the cross I’m rooted in. The ? is the gate that asks whether this thing deserves any of the first two at all.
Three symbols at the bottom of an email. Small discipline. Aimed at a problem Seneca was already naming two thousand years ago.
The hourglass is running. Most of what asks for your time does not deserve it. Pay attention.