Seneca, the ancient Roman philosopher, got to the core of our troubles with time in a famous letter known by the title On the Shortness of Life. We complain about how little time we have, he observed — we feel hounded by its onward march and terrified to contemplate the day when our portion of it will end — and yet we fritter it away, day after day, on things we don’t truly value.
Seneca chided his contemporaries for living “as if you drew from a full and abundant supply of time, though all the while that day . . . is perhaps your last”. The average life may not be as short today as it was in Seneca’s time. (Although it’s not exactly long either: if you live to be 80, you’ll have had roughly 4,000 weeks.) And yet time feels as tormenting as it ever did.
And most approaches to time management, not to mention most of our allegedly time-saving technologies, make things worse. Rather than helping us make the best of our little allotment of time, they pitch us into a futile struggle to deny the truth of our limitations and to avoid the discomfort involved in staring our finitude in the face.