Ben Affleck’s mother battled pancreatic cancer and passed away in 2026. “I had a great life, and I have no regrets,” she told her son, “but I thought 83 years would feel like longer.”
But as Seneca wrote in On the Shortness of Life:
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
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.
I don’t think, when on our deathbed, we will ever feel we have lived long enough. Even 100 years, 200 years, or 300 years will feel short when we are at the end. We will wish we had done the things we had always wanted to do but never had the courage to. We will wish we had not wasted our time on frivolous and meaningless activities (like hours of YouTube Shorts).
But most of us still have time.
We are mindful of how we spend our money but careless with how we spend our time. We can borrow and return money; we cannot do the same with time. But we can audit our time the way we audit our money, and ask each day what we actually spent it on.
Life is long if you know how to use it.
What did you do today?
Keep this letter in your book, and it will come back to you.