By always living for tomorrow, one realizes too late that one has never lived.

Objects to

Seneca · · 49

Suppose that to exist is to project oneself. The danger is only the greater: for the project always pushes life off to the moment when it will be accomplished, and that moment endlessly recedes.
, in , observed it among the busy men of Rome: wholly given to their undertakings, they lived as though they would live forever, putting off the best until later. They arrange their lives for the far off, and death surprises them in the midst of their preparations, before they have begun to live.
This deferral is no accident of the project, it is its slope: the busyness that thinks itself useful is often one more , filling the hours so as not to have to ask whether one is living them. We save time everywhere, except at living.

Therefore So to project oneself without end can be the subtlest way of missing one's life: not out of laziness, but by dint of preparing it instead of living it.

Deepenings

The busy, according to Seneca

Seneca does not target the idle, but the most active, magistrates, the ambitious, men overwhelmed with affairs, who never have an hour to themselves; he calls them the « occupied ».
His reproach is not that they work, but that they never belong to themselves: their time is everyone's, except their own. « Life is long, if you know how to use it », he writes: it is not time that is lacking, it is we who are lacking to ourselves.

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Challenges

To exist is to project oneself