This Video Will Find You Right Before You Succeed. Watch It

The greatest human philosophers across cultures, across centuries, across wildly different worldviews agreed on almost nothing. What they did agree on, however, is that the vast majority of humans will let their life pass by unlived. Most people are alive without being awake. That time is the one thing that you cannot recover and the one thing that most people will spend without noticing. Philosophers have been saying this for 2,000 years and this video is their warning in five minutes. Seneca, writing in the first century AD, opens one of the most important essays ever written with a line that I think you should be using to dictate your entire life. It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it. He wasn't writing about productivity per se, he was writing significantly more about attention. He was writing about the human tendency to give time in your life to things that don't matter and to expect that those things that do matter, time will come for them eventually. But that's not how life works. Humans tend to treat life as if there is always more of it coming. There isn't. The one thing that is guaranteed is that life is finite and that eventually it will stop. The problem isn't that life is short, the problem is that we as humans treat it as inexhaustible. Seneca thought that most people are not living their lives, they are postponing them. They are waiting for the right moment or the right opportunity, or they think that time will simply come for them to be able to do something. That magically all of the problems that they are currently facing are at some point going to dissolve and at some point there is going to be an easy, lamplit, well-trodden path that's going to take them from where they are to where they want to be. Spoiler alert, that doesn't exist and that's not going to happen. Everything is alien to us, time alone is ours, and we keep giving it away carelessly. This ties in very nicely to a passage I was reading, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Marcus Aurelius was a very powerful man and he wrote his meditations as a personal reflection, never intending for them to be published. This makes them unusually honest and what he kept returning to, time and time again in his journals as a Roman emperor, was one particular phrase, one particular idea about how to live life. You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and what you think. I think this ties in very nicely with the Stoic practice of memento mori, remember that you could die. And this is seen as quite morbid, but it's actually not. The person who has genuinely absorbed the fact of their own death is not frightened into paralysis, they are spurred into action. Marcus wrote, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one. I say this to you so that you should have no patience for the postponed life. The time is now, it has always been now, and the present is the only time at which things are accomplishable. Most people will spend the present moment in either the past or the future and call it living, this is not living, this is waiting. You don't have a short life, you have a long life that you purposefully shorten through inattention. What are you going to do about it?