He suggests that protecting our time is essential self-care, and the opposite a dangerous form of self-neglect:
Nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing…
We have to be more careful in preserving what will cease at an unknown point.
He captures what a perilous form of self-hypnosis our trance of busyness is:
No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself.
Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course.
It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly.
It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor.
As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside.
What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on.
Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.
But even “more idiotic,” to use his unambiguous language, than keeping ourselves busy is indulging the vice of procrastination — not the productivity-related kind, but the existential kind, that limiting longing for certainty and guarantees, which causes us to obsessively plan and chronically put off pursuing our greatest aspirations and living our greatest truths on the pretext that the future will somehow provide a more favorable backdrop:
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.
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours.
What are you looking at?
To what goal are you straining?
The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
Seneca reframes this with an apt metaphor:
You must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow…
Just as travelers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it;
so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace — the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-life/