Seneca's contemporaries thought he was writing about time. He wasn't. In his Letters to Lucilius, Seneca's repeated target is a specific cognitive error: the person who treats every hour as preparation for a future hour, always about to begin living, always about to act. The Latin phrase he uses — omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est — is usually translated as a meditation on mortality, but read it against modern decision research and something sharper emerges. Amos Tversky's work on 'anticipatory regret' showed that people experience financial inaction as a neutral state — a kind of default — when in fact choosing not to act is itself a choice carrying its own cost structure. Seneca and Tversky are pointing at the same mechanism from opposite ends: the sense of urgency you feel about a market move or a financial decision is almost never urgency about the decision itself. It is urgency about the feeling of having not decided. That distinction matters enormously. The financial error isn't moving too slowly or too quickly — it's confusing the discomfort of an open position with evidence that the position requires closing. Sitting with that discomfort, without mistaking it for a signal, is not passivity. It is the hardest form of active discernment.

What is the last financial or professional decision you rushed — and when you examine it now, was the real pressure the situation, or the feeling of the situation being unresolved?

Drawing from Roman Stoicism / Behavioral Decision Theory — Seneca (Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, c. 65 CE) and Amos Tversky