Seneca on how Procrastination wastes life and prevents us from living today
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| Seneca the Younger (source: See below) |
We’ve all been there. We say don’t we — I’ll wait until tomorrow to do it. Tomorrow becomes the next day, and then the following. Perhaps a week or even a year passes and we are still waiting for tomorrow. But as the proverb says, ‘tomorrow never comes’ and when it does — it’s today.
Putting things off or procrastination can be a great hindrance to living — always pushing some action further and further into the future in what seems like an ever-receding horizon. Seneca (4BC-65AD), the Roman Stoic Philosopher, rightly recognised procrastination as something which prevented us from really living today. He saw it as a waste of life, which steals the present day by promising a future that never arrives.
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| On the Shortness of Life |
In a letter to his friend Paulinus entitled, On the Shortness of Life, he writes the following:
But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. (Seneca, p. 13)
It promises a future that does not exist and never arrives. For the future has no reality except in our own minds. The present is the only place we can live and therefore act. This is not to say that thinking about the future has no place, but we have to be able to live where we stand first.
So what stops us from living today?
Expectancy.
For Seneca continues, adding:
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon the tomorrow and loses today. (Seneca, p. 13)
This waiting for tomorrow steals the present day as it denies us the ability to act now. For it temptingly holds out the future before us, as something we can see and grasp just beyond our reach. As a result we postpone acting in the present (believing we can do it tomorrow) and foolishly wait for a future that never comes.
The future, as Seneca states, is uncertain and not in our control. What is in our control is what we do today. For as he says:
You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours…The whole future lies in uncertainty: Live immediately. (Seneca, p. 13)