Seneca on The Shortness of Time (2017)
It was this essay, along with a choice quote from Epictetus, that induced me to finally leave my day job to go back to University to study CS. I graduated a month ago and began my first full-time SWE position last Monday.<p>I spent my twenties on auto-pilot, allowing external circumstances to effectively decide my life for me. Seneca and the Stoics reminded me of the immense agency I still possessed, despite the obscenity that was the recession and the cost of American Higher Education. I still had some say over my life, or at least over my choices, and if I didn&#x27;t exercise my agency, life would slip through my fingers and hurtle to me a deathbed filled with regret and disappointment.<p>The quote from Epictetus:<p>&quot;How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates.&quot;