Seneca's essay, addressed to Paulinus, argues that life is not short but that people waste most of it, and that the complaint about time's brevity is a complaint about their own use of it. He states that people are careful with property and prodigal with time, which is the only thing that cannot be recovered.
His analysis of how time is lost is specific. People spend their lives on other people's business, on the pursuit of position they do not want once obtained, on defending property, on drink and idleness, and on preoccupations they never chose. He is particularly hard on those who postpone living until retirement, arguing that they surrender their best years in exchange for a period they may not reach and will not be equipped to use.
His distinction between being busy and being occupied is the essay's core. The busy person is entirely absorbed by the present and by the demands others place on them, and has no capacity to reflect on the past or plan the future, which means their time passes without accumulating into anything.
His positive prescription is the study of philosophy, which he argues extends life by giving a person access to the accumulated thought of everyone who preceded them, so that they inherit time rather than only spending their own. The essay is under fifty pages and is one of three usually collected together in the Penguin edition. Seneca was extremely wealthy and served Nero, which is the standing objection to his moral writing. The argument about postponing life until a future date has not aged at all.
Anyone whose calendar is filled with demands they did not choose, wanting a short and direct statement of what that costs.
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