Life Worth Living
Advice you've probably heard 100 times, but apparently I must get old before I can learn a lesson.
It is the unfortunate curse of good advice that it becomes trite and overplayed. The profound and useful bits of rhetoric become overburdened by their repeat application and often inappropriate usage.
Recent rereading of Plato’s, Apology I came across the classic bit of fluff “…,the unexamined life is not worth living,…”. I was caught off guard as I felt my eyes roll over the phrase quicker than expected. The rest of the dialogue had my eyes lingering on every word as it had become extremely dramatic and entertaining. I found myself drawn to think by my seeming automatic dismissal of the phrase.
I felt strongly that if I had encountered it with virgin eyes it would have been something I would have elbowed Marissa reading next to me and say “listen to how good this is.” but instead I glossed over with extra speed. I guess this is a testament to its inclusion over and over in my life - misquoted and mangled in highbrow dinner conversation between bites, bottom third of a poster dimly lit the dusty corner of a lecture hall, given as the dramatic line of a conciliatory post-game debrief huddle the embarrassing little league hockey game. Repeated again and again, but only in this moment catching not the quality of the words, but the speed that my eyes glanced over them did I really give it thought.
Socrates in this section calls it “disobedience to God” to live without “to talk every day about virtue and… examining myself and others…” and truly I find this assertion too modest. Now under forced and carful re-reading it feels less like a quippy piece of rhetoric and more like a fundamental law of reality.
Reading a syllabus for my brother's discrete mathematics course I found myself chewing the concept of a ‘discrete quantity’ in my head. Socrates wasn’t pointing out some sort of behavior we ought to do, but a fact about a human life. A life that is in fact quantized. Humanity has a quantity and quality moment to moment - examined or not. Human life has a length, a condition, a place. Like not thinking about why you stay on the ground does not free you from the pull of gravity. Drifting along untethered from the measures of your life will not earn you freedom from reality.
To lift an entire passage from Seneca - “It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.”
Ultimate necessity comes for every life. Ignoring the measure does not break the fact. With diligent obedience, investment, and measure even the simple or short life is sufficiently generous.
“…,the unexamined life is not worth living,…” was not spoken as a flaccid call to generally compare an outcome or spend more time thinking. It now rings in my ears as an ancient desperate call to realize that without your examination you cannot even begin to live or love the gift you have been given. Without your diligence and virtue you will wake up facing final call without ever having noticing what has already passed through your fingers.