Day 23 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Seneca’s Letter 1 opens with a demand.
“Collect and save the time which till lately was being cut into and stolen from you.”
~ Seneca
Not a suggestion.
A demand.
And the verb he uses, stolen, is deliberate.
Seneca didn’t think the waste of time was accidental or inevitable.
He thought it was something that happened to people who weren’t paying attention, largely at the hands of other people’s agendas and their own unexamined habits.
Time wasn’t running out.
It was being taken, and stolen things can be recovered.
We’ve touched on time already in this series, Day 11, memento mori, the Seneca essay on the shortness of life.
Today goes further, into the specific mechanism by which most people’s lives get consumed by things that aren’t theirs, not just the fact of mortality.
Seneca identified three ways time gets lost.
The first is other people’s demands:
the requests,
obligations,
social engagements,
and expectations of others that fill the calendar before you’ve had a chance to populate it with what you actually value.
The second is distraction:
the activities that feel like rest and aren’t,
the passive consumption,
the scrolling,
the half-attention given to things that neither restore nor produce.
The third is deferral:
the things you’re going to do when the time is right,
when you have more money,
when the kids are older,
when work settles down.
Seneca’s point is that the right time rarely arrives, because the conditions that generate deferral tend to reproduce themselves.
None of this would have surprised Marcus Aurelius.
He was emperor, everyone wanted his time, constantly, for things that ranged from genuinely important to completely trivial.
His response was not to become a hermit.
It was to be very deliberate about what he owed the day and what the day owed him.
The morning ritual was partly about this.
Getting to his own values before the world got to him, so that the day’s demands landed on a person who already knew what mattered.
Rather than a person trying to figure it out while being pulled in six directions.
The Stoic position on time is not a productivity argument.
It’s an ethical argument.
Time is the medium in which your life happens.
Wasting it (giving it away to things you don’t value, doing it half-attentively, deferring indefinitely the things that actually matter to you) isn’t a scheduling failure.
It’s a failure to live.
The Stoics took that seriously.
For vegans, this has a specific application around the work of advocacy and change.
One of the most common complaints in vegan and activist communities is feeling overwhelmed, too much to do, too much to care about, too little time and energy to make a dent in something this large.
The overwhelm often comes from failing to distinguish what is yours to do from what isn’t, not from having too much to do.
The dichotomy of control applied to time: what is mine to spend, and on what?
The answer will be different for every person.
Some people’s contribution is writing.
Some is direct advocacy.
Some is example, being the person who makes plant-based living look normal, appealing, and untroubled.
Some is financial support for organisations doing the work at scale.
None of these is wrong.
All of them require clarity about what is actually yours, what you can do well, what you care about enough to sustain, what you can give without depleting yourself beyond usefulness.
The person who tries to do everything tends to do everything badly and burn out.
The person who is clear about what is theirs and then does that thing well, consistently, over time, that person compounds.
Small, sustained action in the right direction beats large, exhausting action in every direction.
Seneca’s prescription for time is not efficiency.
It’s ownership.
Take back the hours that are being given away to things you didn’t consciously choose.
Not aggressively.
Gradually, deliberately, by noticing where the time goes and deciding whether that’s where you want it to go.
He was writing this two thousand years ago.
He’d recognise a smartphone immediately.
Practice for today
Track your time honestly for one full day, not as a guilt exercise, as a clarity exercise.
Write down in rough half-hour blocks what you actually did.
Then look at the list and mark each block: chosen or unchosen? Valued or not?
At the end, write one sentence about where the day went that you didn’t intend.
That’s the starting point.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.