What You'll Learn:
The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca offers a bracing essay that’s part polemic, part exhortation, about the surest ways to waste life and the best ways to make the most of it. He argues that life is not actually that short if we learn how to live well instead of merely existing.
Key Insights:
- Life is not short unless you make it short.
- People spend far more time with others than with themselves.
- Men guard against others seizing their possessions, but let them colonize their life on a whim.
- Many men we envy and consider great actually lead miserable lives.
- All vices make us delusional, but some are more respectable than others.
- A sign of freedom is the ability to survey your past dispassionately, without feeling shame.
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