Consider a few of the things I did during the 24 hours before beginning to write this article. I watched an hour-long episode of a TV drama my friends had recommended, long after it became clear it wasn’t one for me. I spent twenty minutes replying by email to a sort-of-friend who, if I’m honest, doesn’t play a particularly important role in my life. And I wasted the usual hour or two on social media. I’ll stop there, because this list is exceedingly dull – which, in a way, is the point: I used my precious time in some notably half-hearted ways. And at the risk of giving offence, I’m willing to bet that you did too.
Yet as multiple philosophers and other I’m going to die, why on earth would I spend any time on so many things I cared about only moderately? Why do I act as though time wasn’t scarce for me? Ponder the matter, and you might begin to agree with the character in the , the 200,000-line Sanskrit epic, who calls it the most wondrous thing in the world that “hundreds and thousands of living entities meet death at every moment, but foolish living beings nonetheless think themselves deathless and do not prepare for it.” Seneca the Stoic makes a similar point in , chiding his fellow Romans for acting as though they had all the time in the world – when they knew all too well that they didn’t.
