What we get wrong when we say “life is short”

The practice of contemplating death often leads us to an important realization: Life is short. 

Thinking about the fact that we will die reminds us that we can never know how much time we have left, so we should seek to live each day to its fullest. 

It’s true: Any of us could die tomorrow. We might not make it past our 30th, 40th or 50th birthday. And even if we live to a ripe old age, we may find ourselves on our deathbed wondering where all the time went. 

Life, indeed, is short. 

In light of the shortness of life, it is often advised to “live each day as if it were your last.” 

It’s a powerful contemplation—but one that can lead us astray if we’re not careful. 

In my own thinking and in discussions with others, I’ve noticed a common confusion around death contemplation and the idea of living with the awareness that we could die at any moment: we take it as an indication that we need to somehow strive even more than we already do to live a meaningful life. We can easily start to feel that we don’t have time, that there is an urgency—a need to rush, even—to accomplish all the important things we set out to do. It puts us into a place of short-term thinking. The idea that life is short ends up perpetuating our existing sense of time scarcity (also known as “time famine”), taking us out of the present moment and into a mode of stress-driven overdoing, overthinking and overachieving. 

In a culture of busyness and burnout, where most people have an unhealthy relationship with time, the idea that life is short can easily perpetuate the chronic sense that we don’t have enough time to do all the things that we want and need to do in life. So when thinking of death triggers the realization that we don’t know how much time we have left, we develop even more stress, further reinforcing our sense that time is a scarce resource.

But ironically, our unhealthy relationship with time means that we waste more time with endless busyness and distractions in an attempt to squeeze the most of out of our hours. It’s what causes us to rush around, governed by our to-do lists and our Google calendars, doing a lot but accomplishing little of significance. And it’s often the exact reason why we feel that we’re not living fully.

In the wise words of the Roman philosopher Seneca, I found a better way to think about living each day as if it were our last. For Seneca, what this really means is to completely give up living for the future. Because when we live for the future, we end up missing our lives even as we’re living them. We try so hard to get wherever we’re going that we forget to even notice, let alone enjoy, where we are right now. 

In his treatise On The Shortness of Life, Seneca (a Stoic who practiced memento mori) tells us that living with an awareness of our mortality actually means feeling secure in the present moment— and allowing ourselves to simply rest in what is. That’s what it really means to live each day as if it were your last. 

After all, if you knew you had no future, you would stop being so future-oriented! Fixated only on what’s next and what we’re trying to achieve, we become a slave to our goals, our visions and life projects, our endless to-do list. Even the idea of our “dream life” becomes something that keeps us from actually living in this moment. What if right here and now was as dreamy as it was ever going to get? Aren’t we probably already living some of our past dreams today—can we stop and enjoy them? 

“What are you looking at?” Seneca demands. “To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty. Live immediately.”

Seneca clarifies that the truth is not that life is short, but rather that it feels short because we fritter away so much of it in mindless busyness: chasing the next goal, ticking off the next task, giving our energy away to the demands of others. 

He writes: 

Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

When I first heard these words—life is long—they caused sparks to go off in my brain. This idea felt radical. Subversive, even! Life is long. We have been given so much time to live, to experience, to connect, to discover, to savor, to plant seeds and slowly nurture them over time. What if we replaced time scarcity with time abundance? It’s not about laboring under the illusion that we have all the time in the world and that death will never come for us. It’s realizing that we have ample time for the things that truly matter—maybe we can slow down and relax a little bit. 

We’re hit over the head with the idea of the shortness of life. Google “Life is short,” and you’ll find thousands of articles, books, discussion forums and inspirational quote images about seizing the day and living to the fullest. Search for “life is long” and all you’ll find is one blog post on stoicism and some random song lyrics. But what if remembering the lengthiness of our lifespans is the shift of perspective we actually need to live a happier, more fulfilling life? If we knew that we had time, maybe we’d stop being so obsessed with biohacking our way to ultimate productivity and longevity, and we’d start simply being more awake to the life that’s right here in front of us. 

The contemplation, for me, became: What if I DID have enough time? How would that change the way I live? Would I give myself permission to just enjoy my life? Would my shoulder drop a little and my breath deepen? Would I be able to let go of the need for instant results, and take on more personally meaningful projects that require patience and slow, steady commitment before seeing the fruits of my labor? And would I be able to enjoy the process more?

One of the biggest changes I’ve made in my life as a result of contemplating mortality is giving myself permission to work less and enjoy life more. As a millennial, I’ve been conditioned to tie my identity and self-worth to my career and seek fulfillment (salvation, even) in work. But in light of mortality, the ethos of hustle culture is revealed for what it is: an empty promise of fulfillment that slowly robs us of our time, energy, and life itself. Maybe that’s why COVID—a collective death contemplation, of sorts—finally led to a wider questioning and rejection of the dysfunctional ways we’ve been approaching our work lives. More people are waking up to the fact that living to work, rather than working to live, is a recipe for unhappiness. It’s akin to what in the Ayurveda (the Indian science of life) is described as a “crime against wisdom”:  a willful ignoring of our inner knowing and common sense. 

Although he wrote On the Shortness of Life over 2,000 years ago, Seneca’s descriptions of how overworking and unchecked ambition robs us of life could as easily be describing a millennial entrepreneur as a Roman statesman. He speaks of the false promise of ambition when he says: “You will hear many of those to whom great prosperity is a burden sometimes crying out amidst their hordes of clients… or their other honorable miseries, ‘It’s impossible to live.’”

At the end of life, many of our goals and achievements carry little weight. Of the five most common regrets of the dying, two are “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” and “I wish I had let myself be happier.” Or as Arianna Huffinton, my former boss, says, you never hear at a funeral: Of course his crowning achievement was when he made senior vice president or What everybody loved most about her was how she ate lunch at her desk. Every day. 

It’s so easy to forget that life is meant to be lived. Heading into the summer season, this feels like a worthwhile reflection to take with us. Can we give ourselves permission to enjoy life? Life is long. Can we appreciate the abundance of time we’ve been given, and savor each moment instead of racing to the next?

1. The Big Chill.

2. Stoicism Meme.

3. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

4. The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David, 1787.

5. The Daily Stoic podcast by Ryan Holiday.