Not Much Voyaging, but Much Tossing About

I lost my job, and that means I lost my salary. Thid has given me an opportunity to really evaluate what I need in life — and the list is rather small.

This is a personal essay, maybe a bit self-indulgent. Please forgive me if this isn’t your cup of tea. But I think it can serve an example of how to use philosophy to handle your day-to-day struggles.

I had a fairly strong feeling that I was going to be laid off when the CEO made the general announcement. In the last round of layoffs, no one on my team had been affected – or, using the corporate speak we had all adopted, impacted – and I suspected we would be a natural target this time. I also knew that I was one of two people working on the same sort of problems, and my fellow was exceptional at his job, so I was the easy choice.

Within the hour, I had received the news. I received a PDF explaining my severance package, with a strongly worded note saying that no part of this was negotiable, and with a link to mental health services should I require them. I met with HR, who asked me if I wanted to process my feelings, and I told them I was more worried about them processing my severance check.

This news was not devastating — certainly not like it would have been a few years ago. I worked hard over the past year to build an emergency fund for my family, something I suggest everyone try their damnedest to do. So we had a bit of margin even if my employer hadn’t given me a severance package. There was uncertainty, of course, but we were not thrown into immediate crisis.

I called my wife to tell her the news. She took a deep breath, then she said ‘Well, you never loved that job.’ She saw the truth well before I did. While I was trying to solve some immediate problems – health insurance for my son, budgeting to stretch our funds for as long as we could, and so on – she was already seeing a future opportunity. It was an opportunity to pursue a dream that I had been delaying for years.

Around the year 49 AD, Seneca the Younger wrote a letter to his father-in-law Paulinus. We now call this letter De Brevitate Vitae, or ‘On the Shortness of Life.’ It is broken up into a number of chapters, and the first chapter concludes with this passage (emphasis mine):

Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.

(You can read the entire letter for free here, though if you can afford it I recommend buying this edition from the University of Chicago Press.)

Life is not short, says Seneca. It is just that we are always wasting the time that we have been allotted. If we find a way to properly order our lives, our lives are amply long.

One of the metaphors employed in the letter is that of a man on a voyage. When he leaves the harbor, he is tossed about by storms. He has been driven in circles, going nowhere, and after some time he returns the harbor. “Not much voyaging did he have, but much tossing about,” Seneca says.

By no means did I have a terrible life working at a large Austin-based tech company. But I did not have the meaningful life that I wanted. The job allowed me to do many things — by any reasonable historical standard I lived in absolute luxury. (How many men would Aristotle kill to have a refrigerator? What would King Tut think of a MacBook and air conditioning?) But the cost was that I was flitting about in my life, not really heading anywhere. Not much voyaging. Much tossing about.

That was what m wife saw — she saw that I had delayed going on a voyage.