The majority of mortals, Paulinus, complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life .... It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it.

These sentences from the first page of Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae sum up the problem as he sees it. Almost all of the rest of the essay is examples of things that people do in their life but with which they are ultimately unsatisfied. So what is the answer? As near as I can tell it is to be wise and to spend one's time as a philosopher like Seneca.

Honors, monuments, all that ambition has commanded by decrees or reared in works of stone, quickly sink to ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of time does not tear down and remove. But the works which philosophy has consecrated cannot be harmed; no age will destroy them, no age reduce them; the following and each succeeding age will but increase the reverence for them...

I must aver that the other activities that Seneca criticizes amount to almost everything that people do, and that if they were not done there would have been no Rome for Seneca to flounce around in.

Is the essay just repetitive blather then? Mostly, but there are many things of at least historical interest. For example, The law does not draft a soldier after his fiftieth year, it does not call a senator after his sixtieth...