Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article about how to live a longer life.  Drink coffee.  Don’t drink coffee.  Eat a paleo diet.  Be a vegetarian.  Do yoga. Meditate.  Do this to avoid Alzheimer’s.  Do that to minimize the risk of prostate cancer.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be healthy and live a long life, but what about actually having a life worth living?  Isn’t that more important?

A long life is good, but only if you’re healthy, happy and fulfilled.  So try to get your recommended fruit and veg, but don’t forget why you want those extra years to begin with.  Is it just to be alive?  To check off another year on planet earth?  Or is it to actually use those years to live a meaningful life?  Of course, everyone would say it’s the latter, but our actions don’t always reflect that. We procrastinate.  We don’t take our plans and dreams seriously.  We put things off until “someday.”  How can we do better?  Below are a few practical ways to add life to your years (rather than just years to your life).  Each is punctuated with a quote taken from the essay On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.

Spend

Carl Sandburg once said “Time is the coin of your life.  It is the only coin you have and only you can determine how it will be spent.”  A few extra years would be great, but how have you spent the last 10 years?  How are you spending this year?  How about today?  Stop wishing for more time and start actually using the time you have wisely.

“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. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.”

Simplify

Don’t spend your precious time and money pursuing and maintaining a lifestyle that isn’t what you want.  That feels pointless and toilsome.  Decide what’s important to you.  Invest in that.  Cut out everything else.

“It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return.”

Start

One of the biggest unintended consequences of “planning for retirement” is that it trains us to procrastinate.  Yes, it’s important to save for your future, but that doesn’t mean ignoring your present.  Life is meant to be lived.  If you’re trading the very best of your present for some uncertain future, you’re doing it wrong.  Plan for your future.  Make the most of your present.  Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

Be Intentional,

Joe