---
title: "The Time That Is Stolen from Us"
sousTitre: "Seneca opens his Letters to Lucilius with the only good whose loss is irreparable."
description: "In his first letter to Lucilius, Seneca keeps account of his time as one keeps account of expenditure. But for him, accounting is a way of breaking free from busyness."
date: 2026-06-08
lang: en
tradition: stoicisme
auteurs: ["Seneca"]
---
# The Time That Is Stolen from Us

The first word Seneca addresses to Lucilius does not open upon the soul or the gods. It opens upon something almost domestic: do not let your hours slip away. One hundred and twenty-four letters will follow, on death, friendship, fortune, fear—and the entire correspondence begins here, with the inventory of a capital we keep squandering without even seeing it go.

> Follow your plan, dear Lucilius; reclaim yourself: gather and husband the time that has so far been snatched from you, stolen, or allowed to slip away.
>
> — **Seneca**, *Letters to Lucilius*, livre I. éd. after the French translation by Joseph Baillard, Hachette 1914.

Three verbs for a single loss, and they are not equal. Hours are torn from us—"by force"; others "by stealth"; still others "slip through our fingers." Theft, deceit, escape: three ways to find oneself impoverished. But Seneca immediately ranks them, and his verdict is harsh: "Yet the most shameful loss is that which comes from neglect; and if you take heed, the greatest part of life is spent in wrongdoing, a large part in doing nothing, and the whole in doing something other than what one should." The worst dispossession is not that imposed by a tyrant. It is the one we inflict upon ourselves, distracted, through that perpetual occupation which resembles a full life but is only its counterfeit.

This is the entire diagnosis of the *[occupatio](https://viasophia.org/lexique/occupatio/)*, busyness: the busy man runs, he keeps himself employed, he does not belong to himself. Seneca does not reproach him for working; he reproaches him for having entrusted the only good that is truly his to everyone but himself.

## Why does Seneca keep account of his time?

Lucilius might object: you who preach, do you do any better? Seneca does not evade the question.

> I will confess frankly: I do as a man of great luxury, but one who keeps order; I keep account of my expenditure.
>
> — **Seneca**, *Letters to Lucilius*, livre I. éd. after the French translation by Joseph Baillard, Hachette 1914.

The vocabulary is that of an accountant. Time is an *asset*, a *possession*, an *expenditure* of which one keeps a ledger; further on, it is the "bottom of the vessel" that must not be waited upon to husband what remains. Seneca thinks of time in the language of money—and he has a reason for doing so, which he states without hesitation: everything else is lent to us; time alone is our own.

> Dear Lucilius, all else is borrowed; time alone is our own.
>
> — **Seneca**, *Letters to Lucilius*, livre I. éd. after the French translation by Joseph Baillard, Hachette 1914.

Health, reputation, friends, possessions: all things the fates have entrusted to us and will take back. They merely pass through our hands—this is already the distinction [Epictetus will draw between what depends on us and what does not](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-ce-qui-depend-de-nous/). Time, however, is of another nature: it is "the only thing, fleeting and slippery, of which nature grants us ownership." A strange ownership: we hold title to it, yet anyone may dispossess us of it. Keeping accounts, then, is not miserliness; it is the only possible safeguard over a good that everything conspires to take from us.

It remains to be seen what this safeguard watches over. Not the future, Seneca answers, but what has already been consumed. "Show me a man who sets the slightest value on time, who knows what a day is worth, who understands that each day he dies in part! We believe death lies ahead, on the horizon; in reality, it works from behind, in every day that has passed. For the most part, we have already left it behind; all the space traversed belongs to it." To count one’s time, then, is not to save for later. It is to realize that one dies now, in fractions, and that the portion already lived belongs to death.

Hence this tension peculiar to the Stoic: to become [master of all one’s hours](https://viasophia.org/lexique/prosoche/) without postponing anything. "You will depend less on tomorrow if you secure today well." For procrastination does not defer life; it spends it in pure loss: "While we postpone, life passes."

Seneca’s language is familiar to us—perhaps too familiar. We too count time: we "manage" it, we "optimize" it, we buy tools that promise to "save" it for us. But we must distinguish before we think we recognize. Seneca keeps his accounts to *remove* time from busyness and restore it to the only use he deems worthy of it—self-examination, philosophy, friendship. Contemporary management counts the opposite: not to free the hour from the task, but to fit more tasks into it. The same gesture—measuring time—serves two opposing projects: for the Stoic, to empty the agenda; for us, to saturate it. That this second project keeps its promises is not merely an impression: studying what he calls social acceleration, the sociologist [Hartmut Rosa](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/social-acceleration/9780231148344/) describes a persistent paradox—our techniques "save" us ever more time, yet the feeling of lacking it only grows. To save time, in his terms, often means running faster to stay in the same place. Seneca aimed for the opposite: not to accelerate to keep pace, but to remove the hour from the race so that it might become one’s own again.

Seneca concludes with a warning the Ancients, he says, passed down: "to husband the bottom of the vessel is to begin too late." To wait, to take account only when almost nothing remains—and that nothing is also the worst, for "the part that remains last is not only the smallest, but the worst." The lesson is not to hoard one’s days like a treasure never to be opened. It is to cease letting them be taken.

---

**À lire aussi**

- [Ce qui dépend de nous](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-ce-qui-depend-de-nous/)
- [La retraite intérieure](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-02-retraite-interieure-marc-aurele/)
- [Le moyeu vide](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-03-le-moyeu-vide/)

## Sources

- Sénèque, *Lettres à Lucilius* — Wikisource (trad. Joseph Baillard, Hachette 1914), trans. Joseph Baillard (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Lettres_%C3%A0_Lucilius/Lettre_1)


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/articles/2026-06-08-temps-derobe-seneque/