Life Isn’t Short, We Just Waste Most of It - Philosophy and Neuroscience on Living Fully
“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
Executive Summary:
Life is not inherently short; it feels that way because we fail to live it. Seneca argued that the problem is not brevity but waste, and Heidegger insisted that only by confronting mortality can we awaken to authentic existence. Neuroscience mirrors these insights: the brain compresses time when we live distractedly, allowing months or years to vanish in a blur, but expands time when we live with novelty, depth, and presence. The challenge, then, is not to extend the number of our years but to inhabit them more deliberately.
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Introduction
We repeat the phrase “life is short” so often that it has hardened into a kind of unquestioned wisdom, a cultural refrain spoken at birthdays, weddings, funerals, or in passing moments of regret when we are startled by how quickly the years seem to slip away. It carries with it a quiet fatalism: the sense that no matter what we do, life will inevitably dissolve before we have properly lived it. Yet if we pause to interrogate this belief, it begins to unravel. Human beings, in many parts of the world, live longer now than at any other point in history. The real issue is not the scarcity of years but the quality of our presence within them. What makes life feel fleeting is not its actual length, but the way we hand our time away to distraction, trivialities, and busyness that leave little behind in memory and even less in meaning. The problem is not time itself, but our failure to inhabit it fully.
Seneca recognised this over two thousand years ago, insisting that “it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.” For him, the true calamity was not death but squandering the way we surrender ourselves to pursuits that neither nourish us nor reflect our deepest values. We confuse productivity with worth, accumulation with fulfilment, and busyness with importance. We live as though time were infinite, postponing what matters until tomorrow, only to panic at its apparent scarcity when we finally realise how much of it has dissolved. This philosophical insight has since been corroborated by neuroscience, which shows that our brains do not experience time as a uniform stream. Rather, time stretches or contracts depending on how we attend to it. Days of repetition and routine collapse into nothingness in memory, while moments of novelty, presence, and emotional intensity are encoded so richly that they appear elongated when recalled. Life does not feel short because it truly is; it feels short. After all, we drift through it inattentively.
The existentialists pressed this further. Heidegger described authentic life as a mode of being-towards-death, a life in which the awareness of finitude sharpens, rather than paralyses, our capacity to live meaningfully. To ignore mortality is to live inauthentically, governed by convention and borrowed ambitions, as though life were a rehearsal for something yet to come. To face it is to awaken to the radical weight of each passing moment, to understand that every decision, every act of attention, and even the smallest ordinary day is charged with irretrievable significance. Neuroscience echoes this strange wisdom: novelty, awe, and emotional resonance can stretch perception, transforming seconds into what feels like eternity. In this convergence of ancient philosophy and modern science lies a profound truth: life is not short. It only seems so when it is wasted. To live it deliberately is to discover that it is long enough, spacious enough, and abundant enough to hold everything that truly matters.
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The Myth of “Life is Short”
The idea that life is short has a powerful hold on our imagination. It is whispered at funerals, invoked in moments of regret, and used to justify impulsive choices under the banner of seizing the day. It is one of those phrases that seems to carry a self-evident truth, as though it were embedded in the human condition itself. Yet when examined closely, its grip begins to weaken. Life is not, in any straightforward sense, unusually short. Human beings in much of the world now enjoy lifespans far longer than those of our ancestors. What endures is not brevity but the perception of it, the haunting sense that years dissolve more quickly than they should, that we have hardly begun before we are already running out of time. The myth persists because of how we live, not because of how much time we are given.
Seneca named this deception with unsparing clarity. “We are not given a short life,” he wrote, “but we make it so; we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” For him, the true calamity of human existence lay not in mortality but in misuse. We speak of life as if it were stolen from us, he argued, when in reality we are the thieves squandering our hours on distractions, surrendering our days to the demands of others, and deferring our deepest callings until some imagined future that never quite arrives. What makes life feel short is not its length but its dilution: a scattering of attention across obligations and ambitions that leave little substance behind. The complaint that time is scarce conceals the harder truth that it is our attention, not our years, that we fail to steward well.
This intuition, carried forward from antiquity, has found resonance in modern neuroscience. The brain does not record time as a clock does, evenly and impersonally. Instead, it encodes lived experience according to intensity, novelty, and emotional salience. Days marked by routine or lived in distraction are scarcely inscribed in memory, and so they collapse when recalled; weeks or months of autopilot can disappear into a haze. By contrast, moments of awe, love, and deep attention are richly encoded, leaving an imprint that expands in recollection, making minutes feel like hours and hours like days. In other words, the way time is lived determines the way it is later experienced. Neuroscience thus illuminates what Seneca intuited long ago: life feels short when it is wasted because the brain cannot register meaning in what was never truly inhabited.
To call life short, then, is to mistake symptom for cause. It is easier to curse time than to face the responsibility of living differently. The myth offers a form of consolation, allowing us to mourn what we imagine time has stolen while sidestepping the truth that we are complicit in its loss. But if we look clearly, we discover that life is long enough, more than long enough, if lived with presence, attention, and care. What is scarce is not time but our willingness to claim it.
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The Neuroscience of Time Perception
If philosophy gives us language for the tragedy of wasted life, neuroscience explains why it feels this way in the body and mind. The brain does not measure time as a clock does, indifferent and precise. It measures time through the patterning of experience. What we call the passage of time is, in fact, the brain’s interpretation of how much has been noticed, encoded, and made meaningful. This is why time can seem to crawl during moments of danger or awe, yet vanish in seasons of monotony. Time, as lived, is elastic: it contracts when life is repetitive or shallow, and expands when it is rich, novel, and emotionally charged.
At the heart of this elasticity lies memory. Neuroscientists have long known that the hippocampus responsible for encoding events into long-term memory, responds most powerfully to novelty and significance. Routine, by contrast, leaves little trace. When days blend into sameness, the hippocampus has little reason to record them with detail, and so they collapse in retrospect. This is why long commutes, endless scrolling, and repetitive workdays leave us with the sensation that weeks have evaporated into nothing. The brain simply has too little to show for them. But when we step into unfamiliar territory, whether through travel, deep conversation, or the felt wonder of awe, the hippocampus records those moments densely, leaving behind rich markers that stretch our sense of time. It is not the hours themselves that change but the way our neural architecture interprets them.
Attention is the second architect of temporal experience. Modern neuroscience distinguishes between focused attention, which psychologists call “task-positive networks”, and the mind-wandering mode of the default network. When our attention is captured deeply by what matters, time appears to slow; the present becomes thick with detail, as in the flow state of an athlete or artist. But when our attention is fragmented pinged by notifications, pulled into rumination, or divided across tasks, the brain fails to encode experience meaningfully. Time slips away because attention has been squandered. In this light, the lament that “life is short” is, in truth, the recognition of a deeper impoverishment: that our days have been dispersed across so many trivialities that memory itself has little record of them.
Perhaps most striking is the way emotion colours the perception of time. Moments of fear or uncertainty often dilate subjectively because the brain, wired for survival, slows perception to capture more detail. By contrast, chronic busyness or emotional numbness produces the opposite: a collapse of temporal richness, as though life were reduced to a grey blur. Joy, awe, and love, on the other hand, stretch time not because the clock slows but because the brain registers these moments as significant enough to savour. Neuroscience confirms what philosophy has always suspected: that the length of a life cannot be measured only in years. Its true measure is attention, novelty, and meaning.
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The Wasting of Life
If the brain compresses time when life is lived without novelty or presence, it is little wonder that modern existence so often feels abbreviated. We live in cultures designed not to expand experience but to erode it. Seneca’s warning that we “waste much of life” has become not just a philosophical observation but a structural reality. Our societies are organised around habits that scatter attention, displace meaning, and leave behind little that memory can anchor to. The tragedy is not only individual but systemic: we inhabit economies and technologies that profit precisely from our inattentiveness.
Consider how consumer culture reshapes our relationship with time. We are urged to treat hours as currency to be maximised, optimised, and monetised. Busyness becomes a badge of honour, productivity a proxy for self-worth. Yet these very pursuits drain life of presence. The endless pursuit of efficiency accelerates the blur: days spent rushing from one demand to another vanish almost as soon as they are lived. Worse, the lure of consumption offers only temporary novelty, engineered to provide fleeting dopamine spikes that quickly habituate, collapsing once again into the grey flatness of routine. The cycle is endless: acquire, adapt, discard. What it does not create is the depth of experience that stretches time and leaves memory enriched.
Technology compounds this wastage. The modern attention economy is structured around fragmentation, notifications, infinite scrolls, and algorithmic feeds that siphon focus away from what is enduring toward what is immediate and trivial. Every moment of fractured attention is a moment stripped of presence, and thus stripped of its potential to be remembered. Neuroscience makes the cost plain: when attention is dispersed, memory formation falters, leaving vast stretches of life barely inscribed in consciousness. We lament how quickly years disappear, but it is not time that vanishes; it is our failure to notice, repeated endlessly, that produces the illusion of brevity.
Even our inner lives are not spared. The default mode network, ever ready to ruminate on the past or project into the future, holds us hostage to elsewhere. We replay regrets, rehearse anxieties, or imagine futures that may never come, all the while abandoning the present in which life occurs. In doing so, we enact Heidegger’s description of inauthentic existence: a drifting through borrowed scripts, forever postponing meaning until a later date that recedes as we approach it. To waste life is not only to squander hours externally but to inhabit them internally in ways that are shallow, repetitive, and misaligned.
The cost of this wastage is profound. It is not simply that life feels shorter but that it becomes, in a real sense, unlived. To reach old age and realise that one has given away decades to distraction and conformity is not merely to regret it, is to confront a hollowing of existence itself. The tragedy Seneca named, and that neuroscience now explains, is not death but the fact that we so often arrive there without having truly lived.
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Attention as the True Currency of Life
If wasted time is the thief of life, then attention is its true wealth. More than money, status, or even the sheer number of years we accumulate, it is the quality of our attention that determines the texture of existence. To attend is to confer reality: what we notice becomes our life, while what we neglect might as well not exist. The psychologist William James captured this with characteristic clarity when he wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” In this sense, attention is not a neutral faculty but the very lens through which life is granted depth. The hours of our days may be equal, but the quality of attention we bring to them renders some expansive and enduring, and others hollow and forgotten.
Neuroscience illuminates why this is so. The networks that govern attention, the task-positive systems responsible for focus, the salience network that highlights significance, and the default mode network that tugs us into rumination, determine which experiences are inscribed into memory and which evaporate unmarked. When attention is scattered, neural encoding is shallow; life thins out in recollection because the brain has nothing substantial to record. When attention is concentrated, experience is registered more fully, leaving behind a denser trace that stretches time in memory. Flow states provide the most vivid example. In moments of total absorption, whether in creative work, deep dialogue, athletic performance, or even the quiet intensity of listening, time bends. Minutes can feel like hours, and those hours remain imprinted long afterwards. Far from being ephemeral, attention shapes the architecture of remembered life.
Philosophy, from a different angle, arrives at the same conclusion. Seneca saw misdirected attention as the root of wasted life, lamenting how easily we donate our days to trivialities. Heidegger radicalised this further by suggesting that inauthentic existence arises when attention is absorbed into “the they”, the chatter of convention, the expectations of others, rather than directed toward what is most one’s own. To live authentically is to wrest attention back from what numbs and disperses it, and to place it deliberately upon what matters, even when that requires confronting discomfort or finitude. In this light, attention is not simply a mental resource but an ethical and existential choice. Where we place it reveals what we value, and what we value becomes the shape of our lives.
To see attention as life’s true currency also clarifies why life so often feels short in modernity. The attention economy is built on the systematic harvesting of our focus. Every ping, scroll, and algorithm is designed to fragment awareness, diluting the depth of experience. What disappears under these conditions is not only concentration but memory itself; vast periods dissolve because they were never properly noticed. The complaint that years vanish is, in truth, a recognition that we failed to live them with sufficient presence for them to endure. A distracted life is necessarily a shortened life, not because of its duration but because of its impoverished record in consciousness.
Reframing life in terms of attention dissolves the cliché of brevity into something more actionable. The question is not how much time remains on the clock but how deliberately we will inhabit the hours we have. A life marked by scattered attention will always feel short because little of it will remain with us. A life marked by deliberate attention will feel long and abundant, even within the same number of years, because it is lived with sufficient depth to endure in memory and meaning. To reclaim attention, then, is not merely a productivity technique or a mental discipline; it is a philosophical stance, a refusal to surrender the essence of life to forces that would squander it. To choose where we place our attention is to decide, moment by moment, what kind of life we are living.
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Strategies for a Longer Life (Without Adding Years)
If life feels short because it is wasted, then the remedy is not the impossible task of extending our years but the attainable art of inhabiting them more fully. Philosophy has long argued that a life lived consciously, even if brief, is richer than one stretched across decades of inattention. Neuroscience confirms that our perception of time lengthens not with age but with experience: moments of novelty, depth, and meaning are recorded in greater detail, leaving behind a denser archive of memory. To live longer in this truer sense is therefore to live with presence, intention, and alignment. What follows are not techniques so much as orientations, ways of being that thicken the fabric of time.
One orientation is toward novelty and wonder. The brain’s hippocampus, which encodes memory, is especially attuned to the new. This is why childhood seems so spacious in hindsight; each day offers discoveries that leave vivid traces. Adulthood often contracts in memory because we allow life to harden into repetition, collapsing weeks into indistinguishable patterns. The philosophical implication is clear: to live fully, one must resist the anaesthesia of routine. Wonder need not always come through grand adventures; it can be found in the deliberate act of seeing the ordinary anew, of breaking the trance of familiarity. In neuroscience, novelty enriches memory; in philosophy, wonder reawakens the soul to life’s inexhaustible strangeness.
Another orientation is toward fidelity to one’s future self. Seneca warned against deferring life until a tomorrow that never arrives, while Heidegger spoke of the necessity of living with death in view. Both recognised that authentic existence requires coherence across time. Neuroscience adds precision: studies show that when people fail to imagine their future selves vividly, the brain treats that self as a stranger, discounting long-term meaning in favour of immediate gratification. To cultivate a relationship with the future self through reflection, journaling, or envisioning one’s legacy is to bind the present to a horizon that stretches time into continuity. In doing so, we live not as fragments scattered across fleeting moments, but as authors of a coherent narrative.
A third orientation is toward presence in the now. Our default mode is to live elsewhere, ruminating on the past or projecting into the future while the present slips by half-noticed. Yet neuroscience shows that when attention stabilises in the moment, the salience network floods perception with detail, making time appear thicker and more abundant. Philosophy gives this a different inflexion: presence is the refusal to postpone life, the insistence that meaning must be claimed now rather than deferred. Meditation, contemplative practices, or even sustained attention to an ordinary act can therefore expand the felt length of life. They remind us that time is not something out there, ticking away, but something experienced in each breath of awareness.
There is the orientation of values-based design. A life governed by external scripts by the demands of productivity, the expectations of others, or the seductions of consumerism contracts because it is never truly one’s own. Heidegger called this inauthentic existence, a drifting absorption into “the they.” Neuroscience offers the corollary: when actions are misaligned with internal values, the brain registers them with less salience, and thus they are remembered less vividly. By contrast, when our lives are structured around chosen priorities, attention flows more naturally toward what matters, and memory retains those moments with greater weight. Designing life by values is therefore not a matter of efficiency but of expansion: it fills time with meaning, stretching it into significance.
These orientations toward novelty, toward the future self, toward presence, and toward values are not discrete steps but interwoven ways of resisting waste. Together, they dissolve the illusion that life is short. They do not add years, but they make years abundant. They remind us that the true measure of life is not the clock but the density of experience, not how long we exist but how fully we live. In reclaiming our attention and directing it with care, we do not conquer time, but we do transform it.
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Conclusion
The refrain that “life is short” endures because it resonates with experience. Yet the truth is not that our years are too few, but that they are too often squandered. Seneca warned that the tragedy of human existence is not brevity but waste. Heidegger pressed the point further, insisting that life becomes authentic only when lived in the light of mortality, rather than deferred as though it were rehearsal. Neuroscience, speaking in a different idiom, confirms the same reality: the brain measures time not by the clock but by the density of what is noticed. Days lived in distraction collapse into nothing, while moments of awe and attention expand into spaciousness.
This recognition is both sobering and liberating. If time’s felt length is elastic, then it is within human power to reshape it. Novelty, presence, fidelity to the future self, and the anchoring of life in values can thicken the fabric of experience, making the same hours longer, the same years more abundant. What emerges is not a call to greater productivity, but to philosophy in action: an existential refusal to allow life to blur into triviality.
Life is not short. It is vast when lived with depth. It is sufficient when aligned with what matters. The deepest tragedy is not death itself but the prospect of never having truly lived. To resist this fate is to embrace deliberate design: constructing a life around presence rather than distraction, meaning rather than convention, attention rather than dispersion. This is not the extension of years but the expansion of being.
For those ready to engage with life in this way, the work begins not with adding more but with reclaiming what has always been here: attention, meaning, and the freedom to design a life that is fully lived.
The Design a Life You Love Philosophy
At the heart of this work is the belief that a meaningful life is not left to chance, but built with conscious design. The Design a Life You Love philosophy integrates neuroscience, strategy, and spirituality to help create lives that are not rushed or wasted, but grounded in presence, depth, and alignment. It is about learning to read the signals of the nervous system, making decisions anchored in values, and leading from an inner steadiness that refuses to squander attention.
This approach recognises that life does not need more years to feel longer; it needs more awareness, more authenticity, and more deliberate engagement. By rewiring old patterns into practices of presence and identity, time stretches, depth returns, and life becomes abundant rather than fleeting.
Ways to Work Together
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Recommended Reading:
1. On the Shortness of Life – Seneca. The classic Stoic text that inspired much of the essay’s philosophical framing. Seneca’s reflections on squandered time feel startlingly modern, offering wisdom on presence, values, and the urgency of living deliberately.
2. Being and Time – Martin Heidegger. Dense but foundational. Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death underpins the idea that only by confronting mortality can life be lived authentically. Even selected readings (or good commentaries) open powerful insights into time, finitude, and meaning.
3. The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life – Philip Zimbardo & John Boyd. A psychological exploration of how our perceptions of past, present, and future shape behaviour. It links closely to your essay’s point about future self connection, memory, and the elasticity of time.
4. The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle. A spiritual companion to the essay’s neuroscience. Tolle’s teaching on presence aligns with the idea that time expands in attention and contracts in distraction. It bridges philosophy and practice in an accessible language.
5. Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time – Dean Buonomano. A neuroscientist’s deep dive into how the brain perceives, distorts, and encodes time. A perfect complement to your essay’s scientific dimension, offering fascinating explanations for why life feels faster or slower depending on how we live it.
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