X. What the Greedy Do with Time

Seneca compares how people treat time to how they treat money. The comparison is unflattering.

The miser hoards money. They will not spend it on pleasure or comfort or generosity. They keep piling it up, taking more pleasure in the pile than in anything the pile could actually buy. At the end of their life they have a great heap of something they never used.

There is a different kind of miser: the person who hoards time by saving it for later, always planning to use it for the real thing eventually, and never actually spending it on anything that matters.

These people are everywhere. They work at jobs they do not value, waiting until they can afford to do what they actually care about. They put off the conversations they need to have. They push down the creative work or the meaningful work or the honest work, waiting until there is a better moment. They pile up days the way the miser piles up coins, and at the end they have a large pile of something they never touched.

There is also the opposite error: the person who spends their time on pleasure after pleasure, chasing sensation, always looking for the next thing that feels good. They think they are living fully. In fact they are the most impoverished of all.

Their pleasures fade instantly. The excitement of each new thing is shorter than the last. They need more, faster, just to feel the same amount. Meanwhile the time that could have gone toward something that lasts, something that builds, something that compounds over years, is gone into experiences that left nothing behind.

Real pleasure is the pleasure of a life well built. It grows over time. It deepens. It survives adversity. It is still there when everything else is taken away.