Just like ours, the ancient world was filled with people who had ambitious goals and trouble prioritizing them. Seneca said it’s one of the hardest balances to strike in life.
We don’t want to be the person who can never sit still. “For love of bustle is not industry,” he said, “it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind.” But we also don’t want to be the person always sitting still. “True repose does not consist in condemning all motion as merely vexation,” he wrote, “that kind of repose is slackness and inertia.”
The work of the philosopher, Seneca said, is finding the perfect balance of those two tendencies. It’s about working and relaxing, not working and work avoidance.
When we had the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Stoic podcast, he told us the story of how he found that balance for himself. At one point a few years ago, McConaughey realized he was doing too much. “I had five proverbial campfires on my desk,” he said. He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, and his family. “What I did was I got rid of two of the campfires.” He called his lawyer and shut down the production company and the music label. “I was left with the three things that were most important to me. And those three campfires turned into bonfires. I majored in my majors. I got rid of two minors that I was trying to major in. I had been making C’s in everything, but when I got rid of five classes and concentrated on the three I really wanted, I started making A’s.”
Life is about tradeoffs. It’d be wonderful if we could do it all…but we can’t. Well, not well at least. As McConaughey and many others have learned the hard way: the more things you try to do, the less adequately you do all of them, and the more vulnerable you make yourself to the consequences of mediocrity, inadequacy, and failure. But as Marcus Aurelius put it, when you pare down to the essentials, when you eliminate the inessential, what you try to do every day, you get the double benefit of doing the essential stuff better. You become stronger and more resilient and happier too.
