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What Are You Spending Your Time On?

Daily Stoic Emails

You pull it out of the fridge to throw away—some food that expired two weeks ago. It’s time to renew your car registration. You have to rip out a few pages of the calendar (maybe the Daily Stoic desk calendar?!) because you were away from the office for a few days.

What are you looking at here? That expiration date, that pile of pages from the calendar—this is time. Time elapsed you’ll never get back. But more than elapsed, right? You spent that time. On something. What happened in the two weeks since the milk went bad? What do you have to show for the year these registration tags have been on your car?

Seneca said that we should never spend an hour of our time without knowing what the return was. He was saying we can’t waste time, we can’t just let life happen. We can’t let the pages fall from the calendar, the days tick by. Because we’ll never get them back. They belong to death now.

This isn’t to say you have to spend every minute working. Or focus exclusively on “productivity.” On the contrary, you have to live. You have to know what you’re spending that life on. You have to be aware. Or you will be caught unaware.