Is Life too Short?

Our life rushes by so quickly that all but a few people find that it is near an end just when they are getting ready to live. What happened? Where did all the time go? Better chase the wind in the field. Like quicksilver through the fingers, it’s gone and that’s it. An ancient Greek quoted by Aristotle summed it up when he said, Art is long, life is short.

Seneca in his great essay On the Shortness of Life examined this problem and concluded that life is long enough, but the trouble is that we waste a lot of it

Think of the time wasted commuting to work. In 2014 it amounted to an astonishing 29.6 billion hours, 1,2 billion days, or 3.4 million years, enough time to build the pyramid of Giza 26 times. For the average worker it is 26 minutes each way, but some commutes are 90 minutes or more. And the commuting time is getting longer on account of traffic jams.

Then there is television. Watching time varies greatly with age, ranging from two hours per day for younger adults (18-34) to over seven hours per day for older persons (64+). I couldn’t find the total yearly time spent on this sedentery non-activity in America as a whole.

However, multiply four hours per day times 300 million persons, which comes to 1.2 billion hours per day times 365 days comes to a shocking 50,000,000 years.

We must not forget video and computer games and the time wasted gabbing on Smartphones, sending SMSs, and the opening and reading of email messages every day.

It is no wonder that there is no time to go for longer walks, play with our pets and children, or read books.

A Pacific Ocean of time wasted on trivia.

People in glass houses should not cast stones. I myself waste a lot of time on email.

Schopenhauer says people are afflicted by pain on the one extreme (when they are in want) and boredom on the other (when their material needs are satisfied).

Boredom becomes the bane of many people’s lives. When we are bored, we come face to face with life itself stripped of its artificial attachments. If life were intrinsicually worthwhile and valuable, we woudn’t feel bored. We would savor it like a fine wine.

It seems that boredom strikes those who suddenl;y are faced with themselves and in a panic want to get away because they have looked inside and seen nothing.

It is the person with a mind well stocked with ideas gleaned from reading and experiences gathered from an active life who is least likely to be bored. Like Zeus, he can be content to commune with himself and be his own best and true companion.

That does not mean that the self-sufficient person should shun others, retire to the desert, or become a monk.

It does mean that such a person is not afraid of being alone and will even savor such a state from time to time.

The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we receive from our surroundings.

Benjamin Franklin kept a timetable in which he recorded the amount of time allocated to each of his activities. We may not want to be as scrupulous as Franklin, but we should become aware of how much time we are allowing to slip away unused.

The reading of biographies, which I recommended in a previous post, shows us how much can be accomplished in a lifetime even without all of the labor- and time-saving devices available to us today.

Mozart in his brief life of 35 years wrote the amazing number of more than 600 compositions. Byron died at 36 but left a large body of work. Alexander von Humboldt explored Mexico and most of South America and published his findings in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. He was the first modern to use the word Cosmos.

One doesn’t have to be a genius to accomplish a lot. One just has to stop wasting time, our most precious commodity that we throw away as if we had an endless supply of it.

If we just become aware that we are wasting time, we shall have taken a great step forward.

Freud said. No time spent with cats is wasted.

Albert Schweitzer was of a similar mind, There are only two remedies from the miseries of life: music and cats/

Persuade yourself that today is your last day. Then you won’t have base thoughts or do evil and will want to spend the time you have doing what is most important to you.