On the Shortness of Life, Seneca

Seneca, 4BC - 65AD

You will hear many people saying: "When I am fifty I shall retire into leisure; when I am sixty I shall give up public duties." And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren't you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

Is it wise to plan to only begin living life only once you're elderly?

Seneca thinks not.

Breakfast with Socrates, R. R. Smith

Poached, fried, or Socratic?

Take commuting. You're on a train, in a car, or on a bike, and periodically you're held up by a red light. It might be frustrating, but a red light is a literal manifestation of the law of fairness, that everybody should be allowed to have a turn. And although it is very literal, it's also abstract, for it has a depersonalised authority that we all pretty much obey. In this it enacts what Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century political theorist, said about how to make societies run smoothly. You've got to have an abstract authority for people to look up to and obey, or else they would all turn on each other. He thought that abstract authority had to be embodied in a sovereign, but in fact it's been transposed into something as humdrum as the red light, which regulates people's behaviour and so stops what Hobbes called the 'war of all against all'.