PNTV: On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (#309​)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book on the shortness of life by Seneca on the shortness of life. Subtitle Life is long if you know how to use it. Life is long if you know how to use it. Seneca was one of the world's leading Stoic philosophers, along with Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. We've covered them and we've covered another one of Seneca's great books called Letters from a Stoic. This one is fantastic. It's a collection of three essays. Seneca is also known as the originator of the essay. And as a biographical aside, he was born around the same time as Jesus in a different part of the Roman Empire in Cordoba, which at the time was the major city in Spain. Moved to Rome, became a statesman and an advisor to Nero before Nero went a little nuts and sent him off into exile, which we're going to talk.

About in a moment.

But this book is fantastic. Seneca is an incredibly lucid, compelling writer, distilling some philosophical truths that are as applicable today as they were 2000 years ago. Bunch of big ideas here. We're going to look at five of them now. So if you want to get past the shortness of life and realize that life isn't short if you know how to live it, then what do you need to do? Well, Seneca says you need to quit thinking about the future. You don't have control over the future. Fortune does. As he says, what you have control over is today, right now. Not the past, not the future, right now. It's an obvious thing, but he was talking about this 2000 years ago. Today is the day. He says we need to live with an intensity. We need to live with an urgency. And he likens it to drinking water from a fast moving stream that might exhaust itself. That's how you need to live. You need to go all in and make today as great a day as you can make it. We talk about this. We have an entire class on this called Masterpiece Days 101. This is. You haven't checked that out yet. Check it out. Basic idea is that today is the day. You can't assume you're going to have anything beyond this. But if you can create a Masterpiece day today and then repeat that tomorrow and the day after that, you're going to have an extraordinary life. So think about your high level ideal day. If you can map out your ideal Day where you're just focused, you're living on purpose. You're not getting into distractions, wasting your time, or doing things you don't feel inspired to do that you feel are worthy of you. What would that day look like? And then systematically build your life, such that that day, which will always evolve and dynamically reveal itself to you, becomes the type of day you spend yourself engaged in consistently. Today's the day. It's the number one tool to deal with the shortness of life. The second idea here is about his exile. So the second essay in the collection is called Consolations to Helvia. Helvia is Seneca's mom, and he writes her this extraordinarily eloquent letter, trying to console her and conquer her grief about the fact that she just lost one of her three sons to exile. So imagine this. Imagine being a statesman at the peak of your power, working with literally the most powerful people in the world. Life is pretty good and you get kicked out, you're exiled. You go from Rome at its peak to the some desolate island in the middle of nowhere. How would you respond to that? Well, if you're a stoic philosopher, you respond to that with a ton of grit and antifragile awesomeness, and you write your mom a letter basically saying, don't worry about me, Mom. I'm as happy as I've ever been. But they can't take the most important thing from me, which is my ability to choose how I'm going to respond to the situation and appreciate the fact that nothing outside of me ever dictates my. My happiness, my well being. I control that. And I don't care where they put me. They're not going to take that away from me. It's ridiculous. It's just a perfect essay on the power of stoicism. At modern day. We'd call that cognitive reframing, where you have something negative happen to you and you say, okay, I could choose to look at it in any one of these different ways, or I can choose to look at it in any one of these different ways. I'm going to choose the empowered response. I'm going to acknowledge reality. He's in exile, can't deny that fact.

Right.

And that's not how he would have scripted it, but he's going to play his role well. That was something we talked about with Epictetus and James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war. He didn't choose to be shot down out of a plane and be imprisoned for years, but he was the ranking officer in prison. And he chose to play that role. Well.

Right.

That's his equivalent of exile. We've all experienced our own version of exile, where we wanted to do great things and it didn't quite, quite show up the way we wanted to.

Right.

Life happened. Well, we have a choice. Are we going to allow those external events to affect how we feel and take our next steps, or are we going to realize that we have the ultimate power to choose our response? The philosopher chooses wisely. The third big idea here is wise. Whoop. Seneca says that the philosopher, the wise person, the lover of wisdom, which again is the root of what a philosopher is, which is. I refer to the philosopher's notes. It's a lover of wisdom. That's what we're all about. Wisdom, knowledge of life. Well, the wise person never assumes that everything's going to go perfectly. He says the wise person is not surprised by things not going well. They expect things to be challenging. And when they say they're going to, he uses examples like set sail on whatever day. He says, provided the circumstances allow me to. You qualify it. He says, my business is going to succeed unless things get in the way of that happening. They qualify their success by recognizing that they aren't the only. They're an active agent. They can do their best. But at the end of the day, other external things might happen to intervene. In other words, they're not sitting in a positive fantasy. You know, positive thinking, fantasy visualization of, oh, everything's going to be awesome. We know, scientifically speaking, via Gabriel Oettingen's amazing work on rethinking positive thinking, that that isn't effective. We're. What you want to do is have a clear sense. And this is worth repeating. We haven't talked about it in a while. Whoop. What is it? Well, it's wish, outcome, the obstacles that might get in the way, and then the plan. So think about whatever it is you want to do right now. What do you aspire to create in your life? What's most important to you right now? Your number one goal might be creating a business, a piece of art, a relationship, conquering an addiction. What is it?

Think about it.

Get clear on what your wish is. Imagine that outcome, that end point coming to fruition. What would that look like? What would that feel like? Really see it. It's important to start with a positive fantasy, but we can't end there. Then imagine the benefits you're going to experience, which is what Gabrielle Oettingen uses an outcome.

Right.

W o you've got your wish, you know the benefits you're going to experience, the why. Then you don't stop there, you keep on going. The wise philosopher thinks about what obstacles might get in the way. Oh, well, I want to conquer this addiction. These temptations might come up. Or I want to create this business and I've got some momentum, but you know, maybe I'm hitting a plateau. Like, how am I going to move through that obstacle? What will I do? Which leads us to the plan. Wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. Whoop. If Seneca was alive today, he would be a critic of of the fantasy based positive thinking and he'd be a huge fan of Woop, which is reality based. Life happens, obstacles occur. And the wise person is not surprised by that. They've planned for it. Whoop. Is a great vehicle to get us there. Fourth big idea is from the essay on tranquility and he has a ton of wisdom in that section. One of them is that flexibility leads to tranquility. So tranquility, the peace of mind, knowing that you're doing what you're here to do. Euthymia is what the Greeks described it as. We talked about that in Ego is the Enemy with Ryan Holiday. Seneca talks about that here. Basically says that flexibility is the idea that obstacles are going to come up. So you have your vision and your plan, but you know that you might need to take different pathways. You want to be flexible. And he says there are a vice of deficiency to being committed to something. There's a healthy, virtuous way to be committed, then there's a unhealthy way to be committed. On both sides of that, you can have what the ancient Greeks and Stoic philosophers called a vice of deficiency, which is not enough commitment. That would be being fickle is the word he uses. You're fickle. You get excited about this and then you go over here, and then you're excited about this and you go over here. You're fickle. It's like Angela Duckworth's firework show. You got to have a compass, right? You got to know where you're going and not be fickle. Now the other side, the equation of the spectrum is obstinacy, right? You're obstinate. You are so locked into this has to be the way that I'm going to do it, that you aren't open to adapting to information that comes in and how fortune is trying to shape your path, right? So you can be fickle or you can be obstinate. You want to be the virtuous Flexible. That's the type of commitment we want to have. And in the note, I challenge you to think, well, in what ways are you fickle in your life? In what ways are you obstinate? And how can you be more flexible?

Keep that in mind.

And remember that flexibility leads to tranquility. The fifth big idea here is that we need to relax our minds. He has a great passage in there which very much spoke to me, talks about the fact that you can't constantly be on, right? So I talk all the time about the need to oscillate, and I talk about that all the time because it's a practice I need to continue to engage in. Oftentimes I want to be on all the time. And he says it's like a fertile farmland. You can't constantly try to produce on it. You've got to give it time to rest or it's going to lose its productivity. It's the same thing with our minds. We need to allow and bake in time for recreation. He says, go out on a vigorous walk, go do something amusing, go dancing, do something frivolous to give your mind time to relax. I just started reading another book called Daniel Goleman wrote it called Focus. He says the exact same thing 2000 years later, that we need to find ways to oscillate, turn our minds off. Obviously, we got to be able to turn it on. But also off and on that point Seneca makes a joke. He says, look, when I say you need to loosen your grip on being productive, I didn't say you need to sever the connection, right? It doesn't mean that you should be lazy. Work hard, recover adequately, work hard again. And he shares some great stories which were essentially shut down, complete rituals back in the ancient days. One guy stopped working at the 10th hour. And in Roman times, the 6th hour was the siesta sexta is what they called it, which is how we got siesta. That's when you took a nap. So I did the math. The 10th hour is what? It's 4pm so this one individual wouldn't do anything after 4pm shut down complete is how Cal Newport described it in Deep Work. And they wouldn't accept new bills or whatever in their legal system after 4pm he talks about the fact that they initiated holidays to basically enforce kind of national holidays, if you will, to enforce this idea of taking time off, you can't always be on. So check in and see where you are. If you fall on the spectrum like I do of trying to work too much and I'm good at shutting down and taking the weekends off. But during the day I like to see how much I can get out of it. I need to bake in more deliberate, healthy recovery. And on that note, one other little idea. Don't go online and surf more and be engaged in things that may not be work but that are stimulating. In the note I talk about Kelly McGonigal's wisdom on this Some things are way more effective for stress relief than others. You don't want to be jacking yourself up with more dopamine high reward activities you want to truly check out. So relax your mind. Be flexible if you want to be tranquil. Remember, the wise person is not surprised by things. We're anticipating obstacles so we can make a plan for them. If you ever get sent to exile, try to write a letter to your loved ones letting them know we're good. I miss you. He was very clear. I miss you and this is reality and I'm better than ever and today is the day. That's the way that you seize life and make the most of it. Life is long if you know how to use it. The way to use it is to make today a masterpiece. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more. What was your favorite big idea? How are you going to make it a bigger part of your life? Get on that. Make today another masterpiece.

Awesome day.

See you. Hi, this is Brian.

I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode.

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