Seneca's On the Shortness of Life is a text that can be easily understood at a surface level to serve utilitarian purposes. Popular readings in the online space have extracted a reading to this effect. Such a culture of optimization and routine hollows out the depth of philosophy, leaving a lifeless skinsuit which can be worn by those that desire a profound significance for their morning routine or meal planning schedule. All such ways of thinking are profoundly measured in a way that dispels any pretense at mystery or spontaneity. To live according to this line of thinking makes the approaching replacement of the human by mechanical processes a legitimate threat for the human animal. On the contrary to this popular reading, we will dig into the subtext of On the Shortness of Life. Ironically Seneca wrote about such people in this very essay, he called those affected by this condition the "engrossed".1
Seneca proclaims the philosophizing individual as embodying the highest form of being: "Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live".2 This assertion has a whiff of pomposity and self-congratulation that has been echoed by many with a philosophical bent throughout thinking history. Yes obviously, to the philosopher, the aloof and impractical thinker is the true use of human mental machinery. This must be why most cannot stand to be in their presence, it is the light of their intellectual truth that exposes the wastage of the great mass, and certainly not their awkwardness.
Seneca expounds upon two forms of thinking:3
Engrossed thinking - A combination of cost-benefit analysis combined with short-sightedness. Intellectual production must be measured, planned and made common by the 'current thing'.
Eternal4 thinking - A deontological pursuit of scholarly activity. Should not be bounded by timelines or predicated on projected outcomes. Genuine pursuit of a thread of intellectual production can equally lead to a dead-end, short essay or decade-long magnum opus.
In a strange way it is consoling to learn that the phenomenon of mass hoards of the engrossed is not merely a symptom of modernity, as many often lament. Just as we witness the short-term undulations of social media technocycles, Seneca also witnessed those who "rush about in the performance of social duties, who give themselves and others no rest".5 Ever since there has been the experience of FOMO and human anxiety locked in with social pressure there has been those who torture themselves, and others, with gossip. Those who become restless in the silence of the night whether it be due to the murmurs of the town square or the blue light of an LED rectangle. Never satisfied, the engrossed are left hungry by the meager intellectual engagement available in the mainframe they have bounded their thought within. The engrossed endure a constant scrambling of panicked searching for the 'next thing'.
"They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn."6
It is engrossed thinking that has given us the slavish nature of contemporary people. The human who knows far too much about their existence and constantly questions what they are making of their limited time reaches out for salvation: "a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live".7 Corporate salvation doesn't save the modern Sisyphus from the ignoble nature of his burden, alas he accepts it. Office workers spend their existence under florescent lighting, giving their dues to the spreadsheet economy, for just as long as they sleep. Most who have worked in such environments have known a colleague, or two, who have admitted that they live 'for their holidays'. This existential truth is often honestly blurted once they have the rare bravery instilled by a couple of drinks.
To live, to exist, for a couple of weeks of vacation per year. Probably to exotic locations, probably with superb lodgings and the finest sustenance that the wealth of middle-management can afford. Who doesn't love a holiday? But, gritting your teeth through the other 50-odd weeks of the year so that one can live, this is certainly one way to exacerbate the shortness of life. Seneca points out a common misobservation that "grey hairs" constitute a life that has been lived for a long time or that age indicates inherent wisdom. However, like respect, such things are not given but earned: "he has not lived long—he has existed long".8
This brings us to the sad truth, most are wasting their youth and unpredictable span of life on some distant promise of 'retirement'. As if this is some sort of aspirational goal. To do 'nothing' with the added impediments and ailments of old age, is that what living is all about? Cruises and mortgages coupled with a fetish for the housing market and the importance of which supermarket you shop at, this is all engrossed aspiration can promise humanity. Either, being able to do nothing or obtain the false achievement of your name on legal paper through the mechanisms of glorified usury. Such engrossed thinking doesn't just decay our finite lifespans and ambitions beyond ourselves but also on a daily scale, the treadmill of a single week is just as oppressive to the engrossed subject as his entire life is in aggregate. The lamentations of Monday are sanctified by the hump and reach a crescendo in TGIF, the freedom of the weekend often wasted in drunken stupor, menial entertainments or miscellaneous consumption.
How does all this relate to the contemporary thinker? Such people see themselves as above and beyond the mass described above. On the contrary, the seduction of engrossed thinking is the great (and effective) temptation of our current time. The majority of intellectual production being excreted through tweets that appeal to trends and pithy blog posts on how the latest pop-culture controversy or viral meme relates to some deep philosophical or political insight. To appeal to the distributed techno-biological algorithm of attention is the performance of a middling social duty.
The modern thinking creative engages with the ephemeral and transient. They "rush about in the performance of social duties, who give themselves and others no rest, when they have fully indulged their madness, when they have every day crossed everybody's threshold, and have left no open door unvisited".9 To maximize your exposure you must schedule your creative output to give "others no rest", appear on each and every timeline (in the digital sense "crossed everybody's threshold") and have an opinion on every aspect of the 'current thing' having "left no open door unvisited".
Engrossed thinking inevitably leads to a vanity of the present, a focus on the minutiae of earthly things. Serial tweeters might as well be Instagram influencers at this point: "would you say that those men are at leisure who pass many hours at the barber's while they are being stripped of whatever grew out the night before? while a solemn debate is held over each separate hair? while either disarranged locks are restored to their place or thinning ones drawn from this side and that toward the forehead?"10 Leaning into the inhumanity of generative language with short-sighted metrics as the fitness function inevitably leads to the existential comb over that Seneca describes here. Humanity looses all vitality and creative irrationality, and is left waiting to be subsumed and made obsolete by the march of algorithmic progress. This thinking I have been describing is also profoundly boring, just like the language generation that will replace it's production. Eternal thinking on the other hand understands the human as not a material but inevitably metaphysical being, one that if preserved will integrate and master all supposed technological threats to it's supremacy.
The truth is, that there is an intellectual world beyond the tides of the current cycle. As Seneca points out, in his own time, you were free to engage with eternal demigods of the intellect. Socrates, Epicurus, the Stoics or the Cynics.11 We should be thankful that we live in a later time where we have all this and more! We are free to spend the morning with Augustine, take a long lunch with Hume, grab coffee with Nietzsche and spend the evening in the company of Schopenhauer. What a waste that barely anyone actually reads the primary texts anymore and these are the mainstream thinkers! When writing The Iconoclast, in order to cut through the bullshit of what 'scepticism' is taken to be, I had to dive into dusty translations of Pyrrho which have barely had any scholarship on them in the half century. Most of the engrossed intellectual energy regurgitates video essays and summary podcasts of such thinkers and tries to apply the teachings to optimizing LinkedIn profiles.
Finally, this brings us to the black-and-white pill of eternal thinking: the effect of a medicine relys not on the active substance, but in the constitution of the patient. It is with this that we acknowledge a dark admission, which was as true in Seneca's time as it is for us today, that the great majority are only cut out for a life that is mostly characterized by a captured state of engrossed thinking. The bright side of this admission is that we, as thinking creatives, can aspire to the elitism of eternal thinking. If you have read this far, the eternal is just within your grasp. All you have to do is make the conscious effort to disengage from the majority of engrossed noise. Time is truly relative to experience, just as "wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner".12
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, XIX. Retrieved from: http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e.html
Ibid. XIV.
I say "thinking" to mean not just the framework in which form is conducted, but also the downstream effect that the ontological way of thinking has on the acts and goals of the thinking subject.
I got this word from section XIV, and although not as explicitly used as "engrossed" to serve my point is the best encapsulation of the sentiment: "for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own;".
Ibid. XIV.
Ibid. XVI.
Ibid. I.
Ibid. VII.
Ibid. XIV.
Ibid. XII.
Ibid. XIV.
Ibid. I.
Well said, process and progress and inextricability linked and our subservient to both has lead to the death of an “eternity” within society at large. The recency bias in algorithms always plays a role in this, you’re never surfaced gems from source material text of great works, it’s also the noise of the latest thing. Eternity should be the only litmus test we have.