“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”Seneca · Despre scurtimea vieții · 49 · capitolul 1
Life is not too short; we waste it, day after day, on things that don't matter.
Seneca attacks a universal excuse — 'I don't have time' — and moves the blame from nature to behaviour. The mechanism is arithmetic: people live for decades, but only a fraction of that time is actually lived, the rest lost to pointless busyness, passive pleasures and postponement. A concrete example is someone who has wanted to write a book for ten years yet finds three hours for a screen every evening.
Why it matters It strikes directly at modern habits: scrolling, empty busyness and procrastination. It is a call to audit your actual time, not the time you claim to have.