Seneca wrote that life is long enough, and knew nobody would believe him
Around AD 49, a Stoic philosopher wrote a short essay about time. Most of his complaints about how people waste it have aged without a wrinkle.
Seneca opens De Brevitate Vitae with a concession: almost everyone complains that life is too short. Then he pivots. The problem, he writes to his father-in-law Paulinus, is not the quantity of time nature grants us. It is what we do with it.
His catalogue of ways the Romans squandered their hours reads like a list drawn from any modern week. There are people consumed by their ambitions, people trapped in obligations they accepted thoughtlessly, people who mistake busyness for living. Seneca had a word for the engrossed life: occupati—and he did not mean it kindly.
The distinction he drew was between negotium, the frantic busyness of public life, and otium, the kind of deliberate leisure that actually generates wisdom. Not idleness—active contemplation, study, reflection. The trap of the occupati was that they were always preparing to live rather than actually doing it.
What makes the essay sting is that Seneca wrote it while working as an advisor to the Emperor Nero, widely considered one of the worst jobs in Roman history. He knew the gap between advice and practice. He wrote anyway.