On the Shortness of Life
Timeless advice on the art of living well, from the celebrated Penguin Great Ideas series The writings of the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca offer powerful insights into stoicism, morality and the importance of reason, and continue to provide profound guidance to many through their eloquence, lucidity and wisdom. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. The Penguin Great Ideas series brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.
Stats for nerds
56recommend
94mentions
70people
2010–2026years
79% recommend21% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- To me, if you read On the Shortness of Life and take it to heart, you would delete your blog as a waste of time and mental energy.
- Your revelations echo with that of Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life". You take your life seriously which is an act that I immensely respect.
- When I reread these, I always pick up some details that I missed in the earlier reads:
- On the shortness of life - Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Growth - Show your work and Steal like an artist - Domain modeling made functional
- Every year, I come back to "On The Shortness of Life" by Seneca to ground myself to the fact that life keeps on happening and I have to remind myself that life is long enough if I think about it...
- Copying a post I made a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28388844
Since this is HN, you might be interested in language, logic, and similar topics. If this is the case, you will likely enjoy analytic philosophy, especially Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Popper.
However, if you are coming at philosophy cold, I really don't recommend the academic analytic path. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds and decide that all this stuff is just too obscure and abstruse to be useful.
If that's the case, I suggest a very brief reading list to shake up your default preconceptions of how the world works. The goal here is to make you question your basic assumptions, which is when philosophy is at its best.
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Classic Stoic works. Very accessible entry points to classical philosophy and Stoicism.
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. If you read this and understand it, your entire conception of ethics, values, and how we use labels like "good" or "evil" will be shaken up.
- Republic by Plato. If you live in a Western country, you probably think that democracy is the highest and best form of government. Plato thinks otherwise and it's worth understanding why.
- A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. This is a fairly recent book but it serves as an excellent introduction to East Asian and Japanese thought via art and aesthetics.
- I Ching. The Chinese classic is super easy to read and is diametrically opposite to the static, eternal universal Platonic model much of Western thought it built upon.
- You should also probably read something from India, the Islamic world, and Russia, but I wanted to keep my list fairly short. Some recommendations here are The Bhagavad Gita, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and anything by Dostoyevsky. For reference: I have a bachelor's in philosophy from a program in the US which is almost exclusively analytic in nature.
- > Even if you don't consider yourself important to the world, surely you are important to yourself. At least I as an atheist consider my limited time alive here— conscious and healthy— to be infinitely valuable to me personally as it's really all that I have.
I agree with this completely, so long as it doesn’t actually cause problems for younger people born into the world. At the moment it’s arguably a good thing that we die and let new generations have their shot at things. I’m only 37 and already excited to see what people in their teens manage to accomplish before I die. By the time the they’re full swing and doing cool stuff, I’ll probably be looking for my keys for a car I haven’t owned for 20 years in a bingo hall. No one will need more of me.
Fundamentally though I believe our time is rarely spent as well as it could be, and fixing that might be best to come first. Should I live longer if I don’t cherish it? Should I want more days when I’ve admittedly wasted many? Perhaps the best thing I could do is learn to use the time I have to its fullest.
And of course, I go to great lengths to protect my health and lifespan — I want to live as long as I reasonably can, and I want to be able to enjoy it. I don’t think for a second that I should prolong that to any degree which begins to hinder the opportunities and possibilities of younger people, though. Maybe that sounds crazy. I just don’t think I matter more than another person, just like me, wanting all the same opportunities in their own life. I guess I don’t believe old people should be in the way of young people fully living their lives.
As long as that’s not happening, sign me up. Until then I’d like to learn to use my time more wisely. On the Shortness of Life totally transformed how I think about longevity and lifespan extension in general. It seems to pale in importance compared to the practice of living better to begin with.
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