In his essay De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life), Seneca emphasizes on impermanence and non-renewability nature of time, and how we squander most of our life in worthless pursuits. As part of his discussion on the impermanence of life, he makes one of his most famous remarks.
“So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied of it but wasteful of it.”
Seneca believed that we do not have short life; we just live unwisely and throughout his life, he preached about this ephemerality of time, and find the core causes that makes us believe that our time on earth passes too quickly. It could be pursuit of wealth or power; it could even be us offering our time to others or seeking validation from others. He states that by engaging in meaningful pursuits in our life, we stop putting off the true happiness in our life and thus can’t make the best out of each moment that we are given.
However, the so-called Stoic philosopher himself in his later years was the richest person in the Roman Empire. Most of the wealth he garnered came from his time as tutor/adviser to the future emperor Nero and his service to Nero after he came into power. He even defends the wealth accumulation along the Stoic lines by writing that properly earning and spending wealth is appropriate behavior in his essay De Vita Beata (On the Happiness of Life). Another question on Seneca’s character comes from his student and future emperor Nero. Nero is infamous in history as one of the most cruel, and deranged emperor, who would go on to set fire to the city of Rome; have his own mother as well as his tutor, Seneca murdered and eventually commit suicide. This further raises the concerns about Seneca’s own capability and his teachings on Stoicism.
Seneca’s forced suicide by Nero is also quite interesting. As Nero had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, he pursued everyone he thought was involved in it out of spite. Nero was so alarmed and paranoid that he even began suspecting his close aides including Seneca. Although Seneca served in Nero’s government as his advisor; growing differences between them led to Seneca’s declining influence on Nero later, especially after Nero murdered his own mother. This eventually culminated into Nero alleging Seneca of involvement in conspiracy to assassinate him (which probably was just a suspicion). Due to his age and his diet, the blood loss was slow prolonging the suicide. His friends then carry him onto the hot bath to expedite the blood flow and his suicide to ease the pain, which is portrayed in the painting El Suicidio de Seneca (1871) by Manuel Sànchez. As an exemplary of the moral virtuousness even in the face of tyranny, he maintained his calm and composure, and faced his death with the same relentlessness and perseverance that he lived and preached throughout his life.
His forced, painful and horrible suicide is where the modern day meaning of the word stoic, (i.e. emotionless) comes from and is misleading to the true philosophy of stoicism. Stoicism instead is about pursuing self-development, wisdom and perseverance to live a good life, an ethical life, and to achieve eudaimonia. So instead of referring to an emotionless person or one who is indifferent towards emotion, being a stoic is about not letting emotions cloud your judgement. It’s about controlling what you can in your life, instead of focusing on what you don’t have control over. As a stoic, you learn to distinguish between these events and aim to reach one’s greatest potential as a human being — either by acting, if you have control or through acceptance, if you don’t. In doing so, you tackle every events that you encounter in life with wisdom, temperance, justice and courage, and take them as learning opportunities rather than lamenting over what could have happened. With preachings of Stoicism, it is possible to make ourselves more wiser, more temperate and more ethical each day.
I stumbled upon this song titled ‘Seneca’ for the first time while I was trying to understand the stoicism sometimes two years back. Since then “Novo Amor” , the artist, has become one of my favorite artists. You could say that Novo Amor has become my novo amor recently. The song, as the title hints, emanates the stoic vibe. Perfectly capturing the dichotomy of what you can control in life and what you can’t, it takes you in a rollercoaster ride of the lyrics and music.
But the main question, as Novo Amor asks at the end of the song, is that when the situation gets bad and if you were given the chance, would you opt to trade space and escape or would you just face it like Seneca did with his forced suicide. And while you are choosing — remember that everything in life comes to an end and the only thing you can control is how you choose to react to all the things life throws at you!
https://medium.com/@ashutoshtimilsina/seneca-stoicism-and-novo-amor-6e7df01e0a7