Stoicism 1 – Week 2: Time is ours

Not yet trial-taught Not yet expert-reviewed

This week: read the opening of Seneca’s Letter 1 slowly, choose and protect one "kept hour" each day for something you value, and in the evening note where your time went.

Measurable goal: one kept hour a day, on at least 5 of 7 days.

1. Traditional teaching

[Traditional teaching] Stoicism teaches that most things we think of as ours are not wholly ours, while our lifetime slips away every day whether we notice or not. Seneca (about 4 BC – AD 65), a Roman philosopher and statesman, opens his letters to his friend Lucilius with advice to hold on to time.

Reading it in context

• Seneca was wealthy and powerful. In this very letter he admits that he still wastes time himself, and can only say where and why he wastes it.
• [Inference] "Nothing is ours except time" seems to differ from Epictetus in Week 1, who does not put time on his list of things in our power. Read in full, Seneca also calls time "slippery", something anyone can take from us. What is ours is how we use the time we have in hand.
• The later part of the letter (not quoted here) speaks of death as something that has already begun in the years behind us. That topic belongs to Stoicism 3, not to this introductory course.

2. What science finds

• We have not found a peer-reviewed review that evaluates a Seneca-style "saving time" exercise as such.
• [Verified] A meta-analysis covering 38,124 workers found that people who detach from work when off duty report less exhaustion and better sleep. This is correlational, and it measures switching off from work, not this week’s exercise. (Wendsche & Lohmann-Haislah 2017)

Limits: the exercise rests on an ancient text and on practitioners’ experience; there is no direct scientific evidence for it yet.

3. Practice for adults

About 2 minutes in the morning, one kept hour during the day, 10 minutes in the evening.

1. Read (2 minutes, morning). Read the passage slowly once.
2. Choose a kept hour. Pick a stretch of the day for something you value that keeps getting pushed aside: reading, playing with your children, learning a skill, walking. An hour is the target; if your day is full (caring for someone ill, shift work, small children), 20 minutes counts. During that time, turn off notifications and do nothing else.
3. Time ledger (10 minutes, evening). Like Seneca telling where his time goes, write three lines. Where did most of my time go today? Which part did I choose, and which was taken or slipped away? When will I keep tomorrow’s hour?
4. Tick it. At the end of the week, count the days with a kept hour; the goal is at least 5 of 7. On days you could not keep it, just note why, without blaming yourself.

4. Kids' corner 6+

Game: "The sand timer" (10 minutes, with an adult)

1. The child picks something they enjoy: building blocks, drawing, reading a story with a parent.
2. Set a timer for 10 minutes (a sand timer or kitchen timer). During those 10 minutes, neither the child nor the adult does anything else or picks up a phone.
3. When time is up, ask the child: "What did you do in those ten minutes?" and "Was there a moment you wanted to do something else?"

Do not turn this into a lesson about "wasting time". The aim is only to feel one whole stretch of time given to one thing.

5. Stop practising if

• You feel panic, have flashbacks of trauma, have a lasting sense that you or the world are "not real", lose sleep for several nights, or have thoughts of harming yourself.
• The time ledger makes you blame yourself more. Then drop step 3 and keep only the kept hour.
• If so, stop and see Get help now.

6. Foundation skills on daynentang

If your day is too full for any pause, daynentang has a lesson on fitting one small meaningful thing into each day: One small meaningful thing a day (in Vietnamese).

7. Practice for today

Pick something you have put off for a long time. Do it for 15 minutes today, before you open social media.

Science sources

• Wendsche J, Lohmann-Haislah A (2017). A meta-analysis on antecedents and outcomes of detachment from work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 2072. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02072