About those 80,000 hours...

     

 

  

               "When time is broken and no proportion  

kept!....I wasted time, and now time doth waste  

me."-Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 5, Scene 5

   

     Aristotle's ‘good life’ is guided by virtue. The virtues have been discussed in these blog posts, but how many of us guide our lives by them? When was the last time you reflected on them, or sat down over a beer or a glass of wine and discussed them with friends? Or asked yourself, ‘how am I doing?’ We rarely discuss living a ‘good life’ because we never take the time to define what that means for our individual lives. In the modern world few are interested in such things, not even you dear reader.  

     In truth, our society does not value reflecting on what it means to live a good life. Rather we are taught and told what it is. Go to school, get good grades, then a job, etc., etc. In between have some fun. Near the end maybe you’ll have a little money so you can sit around accomplishing nothing while waiting to die. So if you do not define your ‘good life,’ it will be done for you.

     Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living.”[i]  Socrates offered these words as his defense for charges of ’impiety and corrupting the youth’ while practicing philosophy on the streets of ancient Athens over 2400 years ago. He was found guilty and sentenced to death for questioning how Athenians were living their lives. (Such inquiries have rarely been encouraged, even today.)  Unlike Socrates, our physical lives are not at risk for philosophical self-examination, for holding ourselves accountable to living a ‘good life,’ but we rarely do so. And yet we readily accept being accountable to others.    

     Lawyers, as well as other professionals, are accountable to their employers and clients for their time in order to be compensated. Indeed most professionals will ‘log’ about 80,000 hours on average (totaling 9 years) during their working lives.[ii] These time ‘logs’ are useful for getting compensated but nothing more. If someone picked up all 9 years’ worth and read them they would learn virtually nothing about who the person was, what they thought, or whether they had lived a ‘good life.’ Logging 9 years’ worth of time offers little towards determining whether or not you are leading a ‘good life.’ To do that requires reflection.  

     The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote “I will keep constant watch over myself…and will put each day up for review.”[iii] Seneca defined his ‘good life’ by living according to Stoic philosophy.  At the end of each day he would take a few minutes to hold his life up to account, to reflect on whether he was being true to himself, living the life he chose. When this activity is suggested the usual refrain is ‘I'm too busy’ or ‘I don’t have time.’ Of course this is often said by those who will spend 2 days, 22 hours and 18 minutes watching Game of Thrones, or checking social media throughout their ‘busy’ day.[iv] 

     Have you wasted time? Imagine looking over your past through time’s distant mirror and seeing all the wasted time piled up. Those ‘piles’ represent your then future self. The self that wasn’t. You owed that wasted time to your future self to develop a philosophy of life, then to hold yourself to account, and to put your life up for regular review. Don’t let another day, week or month get added to the mounds of time you have already wasted by not setting goals and standards for directing your life. Aristotle said “you cannot judge a [persons] life until it is completed.”[v] So if you are reading this it is not too late to define your ‘good life,’ and to begin living it.

    

 

 

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[i] Plato, The Apology

[ii] 80,000hours.org

[iii] Seneca, Moral Letters, 83.2

[iv] https://www.komando.com/downloads/binge-watchers-find-out-how-long-your-show-will-take-to-finish/469781/; on average the daily time spent on social media is 144 minutes a day; The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius ruled over the greatest empire of the ancient world and yet found time to reflect on his daily activities, to hold himself to account. These personal journals were kept for the purpose of self-improvement and for reflection on living his life according to Stoic philosophy.[iv]  He was loyal to this daily habit even while on military campaigns.               

https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-daily-time-on-social-media.         

[v] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b-1098ai9. Aristotle understood that our decisions, how we live our lives, has ramifications beyond out mortal lives, and thus a life might not be ‘complete’ until well after death. Or as Russell Crow said in the movie Gladiator, “what we do in life, echoes in eternity.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDpTc32sV1Y

Painting, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt

You won the lottery, now what?

     

             “People are frugal in guarding their personal property, but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

 

     One in 400 trillion. Those are the odds of you being born.[i] You won the biggest lottery of all time the day you were born, but no one told you. Then consider that many cosmologists contend that there is no evidence for other intelligent life in the universe. You won not only the greatest lottery on earth, but in the entire universe. So what have you been doing with the winnings-the time of your life?  Have you been squandering it like so many state lottery winners?

     Abraham Lincoln reportedly said “a lawyer’s stock in trade is [her] time.” He could have said that about everyone, not just lawyers. All we ultimately have in this life is our time, and how we choose to spend it. In the end it might seem that our lives were all too short, but as the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote 2000 years ago:

           “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity [binge watching Netflix?], we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…Life is long if you know how to use it.” [ii]

      It is our life so we have the moral obligation to decide how to spend the time of our life. Unfortunately, too many of us rarely if ever reflect on how we should spend it. Instead, the lottery winnings are mindlessly frittered away day after day, week after week, year after year.[iii] We unwittingly treat each passing moment the same, as if they are all of equal value, but they’re not. Each day, week, month and year we spend makes the next, of necessity, more valuable, because our life and the projects we fill them with, are finite.[iv] Yet we tend not to treat them that way.  We live habitually, not mindfully.

     In his thought provoking book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, Martin Hagglund places our life choices in terms of what it means to be a free human being:

        “….we are free because we are able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time. All forms of freedom-e.g. the freedom to act, the freedom to speak, the freedom to love-are intelligible as freedom only insofar as we are free to engage the question of what we should do with our time.”[v]

To live freely requires that we confront the moral challenge of choosing how to spend the time of our finite lives. If you do not feel free, perhaps it is due in part to not reflecting on this profound question. Consider that the one thing that truly “belongs to each of us is not property or goods, but the time of our life.”[vi] Certainly, reflecting on this is worth some of your time?

   

 

 

 

 

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[i] https://www.theepochtimes.com/scientists-calculate-the-probability-of-your-existence_787114.html

[ii] Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

[iii] To get a vivid look at the calendar of your life see Tim Urban’s startling look at the brevity of your time: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

[iv] Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Life and Spiritual Freedom (2019)

[v] Id. at 23.

[vi] Id.

Painting, Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

Virtue in the Time of a Pandemic

I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent-no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you. - Seneca

     This Blog Spot began as an exploration of how Aristotle’s twelve virtues apply to the practice of law. In point of fact, however, Aristotle’s virtues were meant as a guide for leading a “good life.” Aristotle’s touchstone for what constitutes a “good life” was the ancient Greek notion of “eudaimonia”, which is often translated as “happiness” or “flourishing.” Eudaimonia is derived from the Greek words for ‘good’ (eu) and ‘spirit’ (daimon). So for Aristotle leading a ‘good life’ involves developing a ‘good soul.’

     Aristotle’s “good life” is achieved by living virtuously. That is, the ‘good souls’ are those whose lives are guided by virtues such as “courage” (doing what is right under difficult circumstances), “temperance” (throttling emotions by showing restraint and self-control), “liberality” (being charitable and generous, i.e. being kind), etc.  Of his twelve virtues these three are especially relevant during a pandemic. Why?

     In our humdrum everyday lives we are not often compelled by circumstances to exhibit courage, self-restraint, generosity and charity. On a typical day most of us might not have the opportunity to practice these virtues. The great Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote:

     “Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it….Since it is unfamiliarity that makes a thing more formidable than it really is, this habit of continual reflection [on the travails that will befall us] will ensure that no form of adversity finds you a [completely unprepared]. “

Indeed, recognizing this the Stoic philosophers would intentionally put themselves in challenging situations to prepare themselves for the “hard times” they knew life would inevitably and unexpectedly present. In this way they could practice virtuous behavior in the “good times” to be able to live by them during the “hard times.”

     The Stoic philosophers also recognized, however, that even without mental training for life’s unexpected events, we could still use the “hard times” to burnish our virtues. As the philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said: “Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it-turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself-so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goals.” So to what good can we put our experience of the Covid 19 pandemic? What lifelong goals can this unprecedented experience help us achieve? Can we use this unique challenge to make us and our community better, more virtuous? Aristotle would say ‘yes.’

      Aristotle famously said “man is a political animal.” He did not mean by this that we should actively participate in politics. Rather, he believed that humans could only flourish, i.e. achieve “eudemonia”, as part of a close knit community that agreed on certain rules and customs, or as the Greeks termed it a “polis.” You can think of the modern “polis” as a series of concentric circles consisting of family at the center, then friends and neighbors, our work environment, and the community in which we live.  Importantly, it is only as a member of a polis that we can act virtuously and achieve being "good souls." With this view in mind we can see that finding it within ourselves to show self-restraint, act courageously and charitably has the potential to make us “good souls” while also enabling those in our “polis” to flourish. Thus, living in the time of a pandemic has given us the opportunity to practice our virtues, to be better members of our polis, and to become "good souls."
It is up to each of use to take advantage of this rare opportunity to be challenged, to become better, and to bring us ever closer to achieving the "good life."

        

Painting, Edward Hopper, Morning Sun