Stop Giving Your Time Away to Be Polite - Seneca (Stoicism)

Stop Giving Your Time Away to Be Polite - Seneca (Stoicism). Time is the one thing you should be completely greedy with. You can replace a house or a job, but you can never get back a wasted hour. Seneca noticed a contradiction in how the wealthy, powerful people in Rome managed their assets. If a neighbor tried to dispute a property line or encroach on a Roman nobleman's estate, they would immediately drag them to court. If someone tried to steal a single silver coin, they would fight them in the streets. They guarded their physical property fiercely. But when it came to their time, they handed it out to absolutely anyone who asked. In On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote: "People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy." Let’s look at the daily routine of the Roman elite. Every single morning, there was a social ritual called the salutatio in which lower-status citizens, known as clients, would line up outside the houses of wealthy politicians and aristocrats. When the doors opened, these crowds would file into the atrium just to say hello, flatter the patron, and ask for political favors. In exchange for showing up and acting as a loyal entourage, the wealthy patron would hand each client a sportula—a daily payout of actual cash. The elites thought they were buying loyalty, but according to Seneca, they were literally paying people to waste their time. They spent their most productive morning hours standing around, letting hundreds of people interrupt them—all to look important and maintain an image they probably didn't even care about. Today, nobody lines up at your door for coins. But we still give away our time for things we just don't care about, purely to keep up appearances. We stay late at the office answering emails that could wait until tomorrow, trying to impress a boss who would replace us in a week. We accept meeting invites with no agenda because we don't want to seem unhelpful. We agree to get coffee with an old acquaintance, wasting an hour pretending to care about a project we have absolutely zero interest in. We give away time we can never get back just to look good to other people. Seneca’s solution is to start auditing your time the same way you audit your bank account. Time is the one thing you should be completely greedy with. You can replace a house or a job, but you can never get back a wasted hour. To fix this, try setting boundaries. Wherever you have control, start quietly saying no. Decline the coffee invite and offer to answer their question over email instead. Put your phone on 'Do Not Disturb' so you don't waste your Saturday on a group chat. Block your peak hours as busy, and communicate well so people learn to respect your focus time. Your time belongs to you. So stop giving it away for things you don't care about. Seneca was a prominent Roman philosopher and playwright who published several essential works about Stoicism. He counseled Emperor Nero, and thought that anger is a temporary madness, and that even when justified, we should never act on the basis of it because it affects our sanity. Seneca wrote a book specifically on anger called “De Ira” which defines and explains anger within the context of Stoic philosophy, and offers advice on how to prevent and control anger and that’s why in this video we are going to look at 10 ways we can control our anger from the teachings of Seneca. Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. Even though it is over 2000 years old, more and more people are discovering how Stoicism is not only relevant to modern times, but can be applied in very simple, yet strong ways.