On the Shortness of Life is a moral essay written by Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher who lived between 4BC – 65AD. In his letter to his friend Paulinus, he lays out Stoic principles that have lasted centuries in teaching us about the value of life itself.

Inspired by this essay, I have written a series of posts on my interpretations on the different themes that occur in his writing (Parts II-V to be published). Even if you haven’t heard of the Stoics before, in just a few short pages, a lifetime of lessons can be learned.

• Part I – Finiteness
• Part II – Protecting time and living in the present
• Part III – Desire and life goals
• Part IV – Learning
• Part V – Death

life is long if you know how to use it

“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 generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.”

Seneca introduces the contradictory life lead by most men, in that it is a common belief that the human lifespan isn’t long enough to achieve everything we want to do. Yet, we squander so much of it on things that don’t matter, or don’t contribute to the things that we want to achieve in the first place.

If only we could learn how to use time more appropriately, perhaps then we wouldn’t feel that it is too short, but instead it is a brilliant miracle that we have even the few years that we are given.

“Just as there is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle.”

There will never be enough time. We will always find ways to fill up whatever we were given. Even on a daily basis, whether we have an hour to do something, or 30 minutes, we are very capable of using up whatever time we’re given to achieve the same thing.

From my own experience, I can easily find ways to put something off for entire weeks or months, and yet when it comes to the deadline, I manage to do finish it all in one day. Why did I not just take a single day to do it?

Because, despite knowing that my time is finite, for some reason I choose to live as if it’ll last forever. Much of my time is spent at my desk job not being present in the moment, or spent being idle, and ultimately not contributing to my one amazing thing.

Like most people, I have a bucket list, which I’m working on, but I still see myself putting things off way into the future, even though I don’t even know if I’ll be alive five or ten years from now.

I’m not the only one. Life can be a difficult thing to figure out. Seneca thought so too.

“Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man, yet there is nothing which is harder to learn.”

When we’re asked the question, “What do you do for a living?” we tend to answer with our job titles. Hundreds of years of social conditioning has taught us to. But our one chance to walk this earth isn’t for working.

Distracted by the mundane interruptions of daily life, we forget our main purpose. It’s simply to live.

We don’t have to do something huge and exciting every day to ‘live’. We all have commitments and we’re constrained to an extent by society and the reality of having to earn a living, or take care of those who rely on us. But the very least one could do is to enjoy each and every day that we are still breathing, each day that we have above ground, where we can smell the delicious scent of coffee and feel the sunlight on our cheeks.

The biggest regret I could have is to reach the end of my life, whenever that may be, and felt that I had not lived it fully.

Even if it takes a lifetime to learn how to live, the best (and only) thing you could do is to spend it trying.

After receiving quite a few comments and emails over the past few months asking me about my minimalistic habits I’ve decided to start a new series called ‘My Minimalist…’ which details particular minimalist aspects of my life, such as what does my room look like? What do I like to eat? What’s in my wardrobe? Of course I love you guys so much I’m more than happy to share what’s lurking in my cupboard. (As far as I know, there aren’t any skeletons!)

Let’s begin with my wardrobe. The key to building a minimalist wardrobe is versatility. Almost everything I own can be worn either everyday, or mixed and matched on different occasions to make dozens of combinations of outfits. That way, I reduce the amount of clothes I actually own. Overall, I own about fifty pieces of clothing, including everyday outfits, ‘going out’ outfits, sports gear, shoes, socks, underwear, accessories, coats, scarves and pj’s. It sounds like a lot, but most of it is counting the little things, like a pair of socks here and there. A quick snapshot of my cupboard shows that about this number can comfortably fit into a small-normal sized wardrobe:

I’ve seen wardrobes that are practically spilling with clothes. Actually, in some, you can even see corners of clothes hang out forlornly over the shelf edge, constantly being squashed because it’s stopping the door from fulling closing.

As for shoes, I’m lucky enough to live in a country with fairly mild weather, so I can get away with wearing fairly light shoes that don’t need replacing that often if I take care of them. I love wearing my brown boots, but they’re impractical for cycling so I usually go for the casual plimpsole/trainer. I own a pair of plain black heels that go with literally any outfit and have served me well for almost two years now for going out at night (both pictured above).

All of my socks and underwear are plain and mostly black. All of my clothes are easy to wash or can be hand-washed, and tumble dried and don’t need ironing. They also dry very quickly, which is good because it means I can ‘turn over’ clothes efficiently, ie. I don’t have to wait for long for clothes to dry on a rack before being able to wear them again. I can usually wash something in the sink and hang it up overnight and wear it in the morning.

Over Easter, I lived a month out of a single suitcase because I only took a few pieces of clothing but I styled them by mixing and matching. For example, here is one dark grey top dressed in three different ways:

Here is another top I love, as you can see, not everything has to be just one plain colour if you dress it up! Here it is pictured with the above jeans and black skirt and a  pair of shorts. These three outfits are perfect for casualwear, eveningwear and summerwear!

The number of combinations you can do rises exponentially even if you only add a few more items and match them well. I actually took a few more pictures with more or less the same tops and bottoms but you get the idea! I don’t want to bore you with a fashion lecture 🙂

So you see, it’s all about choosing the right things before you buy. Here a quick summary for future reference:

• Check the label to see if it can be handwashed and/or tumbled dried etc. depending on how much time you can spend cleaning. Obviously never buy anything that needs dry cleaning (including dresses – there’s so many nice alternatives out there that don’t cost half the retail price just to clean!)
• Think about the rest of your wardrobe and how many pieces you can match it with. Try not to buy anything that has ‘occasion restrictions’ such as ‘really-hot-days-only’ or ‘posh-occasion-only’.
• And finally, if you buy this new piece of clothing, what can you throw out/donate in it’s place?

There are no right or wrong answers. Just the one that is true.

1. How did you feel when you woke up this morning?

2. How long did it take to turn on your phone or laptop?

3.  What is your dream?

4. Are you trading time for money?

5. Where will you be exactly one year from now?

6. Where will you be five years from now?

7. Is this where you thought you’d be five years ago?

8. Do you own anything you absolutely can’t live without?

9. How do you feel when you know you have a lecture in 5 minutes?

10. How do you feel during your lectures?

11. If you met you professor(s) outside of class, could you be friends?

12. How much do you have in common with your course-mates?

13. How much does your degree mean to you?

14. Can you see yourself spending the rest of your life in your field of study?

15. What will be the first thing you do when you graduate?

16. Have you met anyone life changing?

17. Have you learned anything life changing?

18. Have you learned anything that surprised you?

19. Do you feel challenged?

20. What are you grateful for today?

21. Have you met someone new this week?

22. When was the last time you said hello to a stranger?

23. If you won the lottery, would you leave university?

24. If you could spend a year abroad where would you go and what would you do?

25. Do you have any regrets so far?

26. If you weren’t here, where would you be?

27. Are you aiming to be the very best?

28. Are you doing your best?

29. What did you learn today that you didn’t know yesterday?

30. Are you happy?

As an aspiring minimalist, I love to get rid of anything I think of as ‘extra’. Extra clothes, extra gadgets… and extra fat. I love to exercise, and I never see it as a chore. Rather, it’s something I do as a hobby, like curling up and reading a good book. But it took a while to get to where I am, and I learnt a lot of harsh lessons over the past year about how to get really healthy. As always minimalism has played a massive role in teaching me those lessons and showing me all of the things I did and didn’t need.

1. No gym

Last year, I ditched the gym. At first, I liked paying for it because the pressure not to waste my money pushed me to go. But only begrudgingly. I began hating going to the gym simply because I knew I had to. When I cancelled my membership, I felt liberated. I developed a much better attitude towards getting fit, I did it because I wanted to, not because of anything outside of me, which is a much stronger and longer lasting motivation.

2. No ‘health-potato’ equipment

Looking back, I didn’t know how the hell I fell for those late night telecommercials that sell exercise equipment that promise miracles. “In just 10 minutes a day you can look like this!” and so on. Ugh, my family (including me) fell for them too many times, paid too much for bogus pieces of metal that never worked and got stuck with trying to get rid of it. Patrick Reynolds, one of my most admired fitness gurus, calls them ‘health-potato‘ equipment, a reference to couch potatoes who want to get fit but are too lazy to do it properly. Taking a step back, you can see that this kind of thinking just doesn’t make sense.

3. No ignorance

These days, you just have to turn your head around to see something, anything that recommends some kind of health trick or hack or an advertisement for magic pills or a new superfood. You can choose to believe what people tell you, or you can choose to find out the truth. Your own research and education about the way your body works, what really is in the food you eat, how it affects you and how it is made is irreplaceable.

4. No fancy stuff

When people want to get fit, sometimes the mix up spending a lot of money = weight lost. This is one of those harsh lessons I learnt. Getting really state of the art trainers with air cushions on the bottom doesn’t mean that you are actually running. Getting expensive yoga equipment doesn’t mean you are actually doing yoga. When a lot of people decide they want to get fit, like at the beginning of the year, sports equipment sales go through the roof because people think that if they buy the equipment, they’ll be ‘fit’. But in the end, without the right kind of motivation, the equipment just becomes like a gym membership, pressuring and constraining because of the guilt of already investing load of money.

5. No shortcuts 

Another simple thing to realize, and yet it took me so long to do it. There are no easy ways to get healthy except by getting healthy. That means exercising more but more importantly, eating well. I used to expect that I could eat chocolate bars and fairy cakes as long as I could run it off. It may work for some people (my brother eats like a pig but is as fit as a lion) but it definitely doesn’t for me. I was in denial, always wondering why no matter how much exercise I did, I saw little results. And then one day, someone told me “only 30% of weight loss is done in trainers, 70% is done in the fridge“. In other words, what you eat has much more an impact on your health than exercise does. Both are important, but one makes much more of a difference.

Finally, I just wanted to add that getting fit for me wasn’t all about losing weight. Yes, it was part of it, but not because I wanted to conform to social views on beauty or any of that rubbish. Instead, I wanted to feel good about myself so for me, during every workout I felt like I was earning some currency to put into my self confidence bank, which was hovering dangerously low for too long. Now, I can say that in that sense, thanks to these lessons, I’m much richer than ever before.

Whenever I walk into a Muji store, I become like a kid in a toy shop. I love gawking at the simplicity of the products, how there aren’t any fancy flowers or frills, how they don’t try to dress up for the occasion, how they don’t need to prove they’re ‘better’ than anyone else. Each Muji product seems to say “I am here to fulfil my purpose, that is all”.

discover your purpose

Everyone has a purpose in life. Unfortunately, not everyone achieves it. Many don’t even know what their ‘life purpose’ is. To them, a life purpose is something abstract and new-agey, to others “a big house” or “a million dollars” is a good answer, but if you ask them “how?” or “and then what?”, they’re stumped.

For me, my purpose is to have lasting lifetime happiness. How do I do it? I try to center my life around the things I care about the most.

What’s important to you?

• friends and family
• being able to go anywhere
• being as green as possible
• leaving a positive impact on people
• not being in debt
• seeing places
• doing what you love
• being content
• following your dream

Minimalism can help you achieve any of these and more because you won’t be focused on the extra stuff that doesn’t really matter, like what your neighbours think, how big a bank account number is or how many heads you can turn with a flashy car.

discover your own brand of minimalism

Minimalism is different for everyone. For some people, it means having a beautiful, tidier, smaller house. For others it means having 100 things. There’s mild minimalism, there’s extreme minimalism, and loads in between, but none are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. They all have one thing in common, whatever your aim, minimalism ultimately means having a better quality of life.

If doing something improves your life in some way, (like getting rid of a shed of junk), that is minimalism. But if getting rid of something that you truly treasure makes you unhappy, just don’t do it, there’s no ‘minimalist handbook’ — you write your own.

So how do you know when you’re on the right tracks? I think inside, you’ll know if what your doing is right because:

• it saves you time and money which you can spend with friends and family
• …or gaining valuable experiences
• you’re doing what you’ve always wanted to do
• it moves you closer to a lifetime goal
• you are following your purpose
• you’re helping the environment
• you have found balance and contentment

When ‘minimalism’ is not so good:

• you’re afraid to spend money
• you don’t want to do things that will make it difficult to let go
• it’s making you unhappy
• it’s hindering you
• you depend on something outside of yourself for happiness

You might not know immediately what your brand of minimalism is, but that’s okay. As long as you get started somehow, you can learn and adjust until you find it.

Just like those Muji notebooks, your own brand of minimalism should help you fulfil your purpose. Discover what that is, then go for it with everything you have, no frills attached.

Just yesterday I read a post with a very interesting statement:

There’s a fair amount of talk in Minimalist circles about the prospect of Living with 100 Items…

Some want to live more consciously, some want to escape the stranglehold of consumerism, some want to lighten their footprint, some want to live out of a bag and travel the world, some want to break their attachment with anything considered materialistic (and there is a whole spectrum that measures the magnitude of this).  All are worthy, and I won’t dare judge or question anyone’s motives.

What I want to be careful of is that it doesn’t become the litmus test of whether one is a minimalist or not.

Let me first say that I really admire the people who manage to live with 100 things or less, especially if they’re married/have children etc. which no doubt makes it a bit more difficult to do so. I also really admire the people who are minimalistic in the way they act – they are mindful all (or most) of the time – and constantly practice awareness and focus.

But I would be saddened if these things do become litmus tests for whether or not one is a minimalist. Of course it’s possible for everyone to get rid of stuff until they have 100 things, or forcethemselves to slow down and be mindful all the time, but the simple truth is that it would be so difficult for some that it would distract them from the things they really want.

Right now I am trying to earn a degree – I want to have fewer things so that I can focus but I still need to use paper, stationary, books, utensils and clothes. I want to slow down and take my time but I’m being bombarded with work and doing so will almost certainly cause me to fall behind.

I may sound like I am trying to make excuses, but I am just being honest. The line between ideal minimalism and practicality is different for everyone. However, I still don’t buy nearly as much as other people, and I try to slow down and focus whenever I can or need to. In other words, I try my best.

I think what I’m trying to say is that there is a time and a place for minimalism; where, when and to what degree it applies to every person is arbitrary, and I don’t think it can be measured with numbers like ‘100’.

I think of minimalism as a lifestyle that you adopt because it makes your life easier, not so that you can spend your time constantly obsessing over it. It would be a shame if ‘minimalism’ was defined by how many things you don’t own instead of how may things you’ve achieved because of it.

Justin, hit the nail on the head when he made a comment on my last post:

In my opinion, the value of minimalism is dependent upon the context of the individual. For that reason I don’t think the absence of things necessarily constitutes a minimalist way of life; instead, the ability to understand the value of what is and is not important to you and your life will ultimately (hopefully) lead to a more “free” way of life. In other words, I don’t think a minimalist way of life is determine by the absence of “things” or “stuff” – instead, I think it depends on understanding them and their personal value – and then getting rid things that don’t have as much value or purpose.

So perhaps you haven’t managed to get everything down to 100, or even 200. What matters is that you have what is valuable to you, you are not attached to things that are unimportant and you are doing your best for your situation right now.

This summer, I will be going abroad for a year. I have no doubt that my needs will change and I will shift towards more minimalism – which means it’ll be just me, a few clothes, a camera and my laptop. In the mean time though, I am going to play my guitar while I can still carry it and read all of the books that I can stuff onto my shelves.

I’d love to hear what minimalism means to you, if it can be measured or what you think about the ‘100 things’ challenge. Leave a comment below!

You have enough. If you’re reading this post, the chances are you have a roof over your head, food to put on the table and even your own computer with an internet connection. You may not be a millionaire, but you don’t have to be.

We are told our whole lives that we don’t want to fail at life. What does that mean? Apparently it means we don’t want to go through life without a job with a posh title, a big house and a flashy car.

But what if everything we’ve been told is wrong? What would happen to us if we decide we don’t want to be trapped in the rat race?

We’d be free.

And the key to freedom? It’s contentment. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to achieve your best or not try to change anything. It means just being happy with where you are now, and stop trying to grasp onto something in the future that keeps moving forward just a quickly as we do. Just like a donkey trying to get the carrot on a stick, we would never reach happiness if we keep chasing something that moves away just as we think we’re getting closer.

How To Be Content With What You Have

1. Remember that: “I have lived x number of years without y”

When Steve Jobs released the iPad, people couldn’t really decide what they needed it for until they got one. Then they magically found all sorts of uses for it. A lot of the time, we create reasons to want stuff so that we can make the excuse that we need it. But we really don’t. We’re just trying to justify a new purchase so that we don’t feel guilty spending lots of money on more junk. Some things are useful, and really do grant us freedom, like the washing machine, but that was invented decades ago.

2. Don’t depend on stuff for security

Many people feel the need to be surrounded by stuff as if they need to affirm that they are working for something. My parents are very guilty of this. I love them very much, but because of their extremely poor background, they simply cannot throw anything away. They feel the need to hoard things because getting rid of it ‘would be a waste’. Even though we have enough money now to buy something many times over, they have created an emotional attachment to things that they need to feel ‘safe’. They’re scared that if they don’t have anything, then everything they’ve worked for has amounted to nothing too. If only they could realise that this doesn’t make any sense. They didn’t work for stuff they worked for us, they’ve built a wonderful family, and that’s something that can never be thrown away.

3. Stop needing to prove yourself

The amount of stuff you have isn’t a measurement of your worth. Almost everyone says this, and yet almost no one follows it. Just because a person has a nice kitchen, or their car has a bigger engine, doesn’t mean they’re better. People feel the need to acquire money as if they’re points in the Game of Life and whoever has the most at the end is the winner. Real life isn’t like that. The real measurements are intangible things like kindness, generosity, love, knowledge, experience and happiness. That’s the kind of stuff Life is made of.

Just be content with what you have. Be happy right now. Then you don’t have to go chasing for it.

I often read advice about how to be successful. Up until now, I must have accumulated hundreds of books, biographies, articles, and essays about success – what it means, and how to ‘achieve’ it, all the while hoping to find a common theme that would tell me the universal truth about the one thing that apparently makes life worth living.

I admit, it’s probably not a good habit to read about it too much. Spending a lot of time reading about it means that I’m spending less time doing the kinds of things that would actually make me successful. Besides, after all these years, I’m still looking for an answer.

I have learned a few important things, however, so it hasn’t all gone to waste. There are certainly common pieces of advice that have come up more than a few times in my readings. One of these is the importance of showing up.

the myth of showing up

Almost everyone talking about success talks about showing up. They say that if there’s one thing in common between all the men and women who have been ‘successful’ in the past – those that have discovered, or invented, or achieved something great – it is that they showed up. They got out of bed every day, even if they had to drag themselves up, and went to the laboratory, or office, or racetrack, and climbed whatever mountain they had to, physical or metaphorical, to reach their goal. They were there when it happened (whatever it maybe be).

But it makes me wonder – is that enough? Does saying that they were simply there miss another crucial element to their success? After all, when they arrived at the door, or the foot of that mountain, they didn’t just stand there.

They took the first steps, they moved forward, and they carried on. They didn’t give up.

They weren’t just there when it happened, they made it happen.

That’s why showing up is not enough. You can’t just get out of bed in the morning and sit your ass down on a chair and expect miracles to happen. Yes, it can be hard to do that, but almost anyone can just show up. It’s what you do after you arrive that matters.

If you’re going to work every day, or to the studio, or lab, or playing field, or wherever it is that you’re hoping to achieve greatness, and your heart is not fully in it, you’ll never get to where you want to be. You have to be present and aware, which means you can’t just be there, you have to be there. Do you get it? You have to put your heart in it, get in the flow, look forward, see the bigger picture, strategise, be one step ahead, push hard, then push harder, and most importantly, do the goddamn work itself. There’s no getting around it.

It’s a medicine that easy to prescribe but hard to swallow. If you have been chipping away at something for a while, and you’re not getting anywhere, it might be because you thought showing up was enough to get you to the top, but it’s not.

It’s like expecting to be lifted up a mountain by the force of nature just because you arrived at the foot. It won’t happen. The only way to the top is to climb up, one step at a time. Yes, there are ways to do it more quickly, and efficiently, there are tools you can use, and maybe there’s a shortcut, like a bus that would drive you halfway up, but unless you find it, you’re going to have to do it the hard way.

So yes, showing up is important. But there’s more to it than that. If you want to condense the hours and hours I’ve spent educating myself about success into just a couple of words, it would go something like this:

Show up. Put your heart in it. Do the work. Don’t give up.