Seneca says, “The largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.”

1. Spending Our Time Doing Evil

Have you ever spent your precious time gossiping about someone, plotting against someone, harming someone, or wishing someone ill? You should ask yourself this question honestly, with your hand on your heart.

If your answer is yes, then according to Seneca, you have spent a considerable amount of your life doing wrong.

But here, it is not just about time. You have committed a sin, and you will also have to bear its consequences. Perhaps Seneca forgot to mention this, but Buddha had already warned us about it when he said:

“Fools of little understanding have themselves for their greatest enemies, for they do evil deeds, which must bear bitter fruits.”

2. Spending Our Life Doing Nothing

The second category consists of people who spend their lives in laziness. These are people who have no external or internal goals in life. They do not even know how to use their time, and as a result, they spend their precious lives doing nothing.

However, I consider them better than those in the first category because they do not harm anyone. After all, every person has their own life to live.

If John Stuart Mill were here, he might say that even if these people do nothing and cause no harm to anyone, they are better citizens than those who earn a great deal of money and achieve their goals but fill other people’s lives with suffering.

I want to say to these people: Get up and set a goal for yourself, for humanity. It does not have to be something grand, nor does it have to be about becoming a billionaire. Your goal can be to acquire and share knowledge, as Seneca and Socrates did. You can make salvation your goal. You can make speaking out against evil your goal.

Whenever you feel lazy, remember this thought of Buddha: “The lazy one does not find the path to wisdom.”

3. Spending Our Life Without Purpose

Now we come to the third category: people who do a great deal but without purpose or direction.

Most of these people are addicted to social media. They spend the entire day scrolling through reels and do not even realise where their time has gone.

They work very hard, but they cannot direct their energy towards a single goal. They scatter their time and energy in ten different directions. Sometimes they want to become writers, sometimes dancers, and sometimes teachers. They keep investing their time in different directions.

They think they have had a productive day, but in reality, they have wasted their time because their mental and physical energy is scattered like sunlight.

What they need is a magnifying glass—that is, a concrete goal on which they can concentrate and work with complete dedication.

For Seneca, that goal was learning and writing about philosophy. For Lincoln, it was ending slavery. For Buddha, it was enlightenment.

Similarly, these people need to devote their time to one goal rather than scattering it across thousands of different things.

They should remember this thought of Seneca:

“Everywhere means nowhere.”