How to Design Your Life: The Stoics Had Enough Time. Do You?

How to design your life is one of those questions that sounds overwhelming until you realise you have been designing it all along, just not always deliberately. Every choice about where you spend your time, what you prioritise, what you let go of, these are design decisions. The question is whether you are making them consciously or simply drifting along with whatever the day brings.

There is a phrase people say constantly that I find revealing: life is too short. Seneca disagreed, and he disagreed two thousand years ago with the same urgency that feels necessary today.

That is not consolation. It is a challenge. The problem Seneca identified was not that we have too little time, but that we give most of it away without thinking. To distractions, to obligations that are not really ours, to waiting for some future moment when life will finally begin. The Stoics had enough time, the question is whether we do.

Time Is Not Money. Money Is Time.

Seneca observed something about human behaviour that has not changed in two millennia. We guard our money carefully. We track it, save it, resist giving it away. But with time, we are reckless. We hand it over freely, here take five minutes, take an hour, take whatever you need, as though it were the least valuable thing we own. And yet every minute that passes is gone permanently. We do not get it back. We do not know how many are left.

The phrase “time is money” has always seemed backwards to me. Money is replaceable. You can earn more, save more, find more. Time is not. If we want to flip the phrase into something useful, it is the other way around: money is time. If you can earn and save enough, you can buy yourself more of the thing that actually matters. That was the calculation I made when I left my job. Not without difficulty, and not without uncertainty. But with the clear understanding that what I was trading was not salary but hours, and hours spent on the wrong things are hours lost permanently.

The Stoics were also clear that the people most likely to complain that life is short are the people spending it on the wrong things. Not wrong in a moral sense, but wrong in the sense of misaligned with what they actually value. Seneca wrote about this repeatedly: the busy person, always rushing, always distracted, always elsewhere, will reach the end of a long life and feel they had no time at all.

The Elevator Pitch for Your Life

There was a specific moment where this became real for me. I was driving home from teaching in Dubai, suit on in the heat, tie loosened, stuck in traffic, hungry, and I found myself thinking: what am I actually doing? The salary was good, but I was spending it faster than I was earning it. Dubai has a way of making that happen, and I had no idea what I was working toward beyond the next month’s rent and the next year’s contract.

I started asking myself a question: if you had to describe your life to someone in the time it takes to ride an elevator, what would you say? Not the job title, not the city, not the salary. What would you actually say about the life?

What came back was clear. I did not want to have to work in the traditional sense, I wanted to spend my time on something I found meaningful, with freedom over when and where I did it. I wanted to help people. And I wanted to be available for the people I cared about, my parents getting older, a relative I could not visit because my holidays were fixed to the school calendar. Those were my values. And none of them were visible in the life I was living at that moment.

That question is worth sitting with. Having a clear answer to it changes how you make decisions, because you know what you are deciding toward. Without it, every choice is just reaction.

Designing Your Life the Stoic Way

The Stoic approach to designing your life does not start with goals or plans. It starts with values. Who are you? What do you actually care about, beneath the things you have been told to care about? What does your life need to contain for you to feel that you are living it well?

The Stoics pointed toward the sage as the destination, the person who acts with complete wisdom and virtue in every moment. None of us will get there. But the sage is not meant to be achieved. It is meant to orient us. It gives us a direction to walk in, which is what matters. Once the direction is clear, every small decision becomes part of a larger movement rather than just another reaction to what the day presents.

The Stoics also valued autarkeia, self-sufficiency: the capacity to live well on relatively little, to not need external conditions to be perfect before you begin. That is what makes deliberate life design possible even under imperfect circumstances. I live on a low budget; I do not need much. That is not deprivation. It is a choice that buys me time, which is the one thing I actually wanted.

And this does not mean that nothing will change or that the plan will hold forever. It might not. I might need to take another job at some point. Life adjusts. But the direction stays. The values stay. And when you know those, you can make the adjustments without losing yourself in them.

Stop Wishing Time Away

One of the patterns I used to fall into was the if only habit. If only it were next week, if only this project were finished, or if only the summer were here. Each of those wishes is a small surrender of the present moment: an implicit statement that right now is not good enough and that the real life is somewhere ahead.

The Stoics were insistent on this. The present is the only moment we actually have. The past is gone, the future is not ours yet, and the only place where anything can actually happen is here. Memento mori, the Stoic reminder of mortality, is not a morbid practice. It is a clarifying one. If this were the last day, what would actually matter? That question does not produce anxiety when practiced regularly. It produces presence.

I have not had the thought “I wish it were next week” in a long time now. Not because life has become easier or more comfortable, but because when you are doing what you feel you should be doing, the present moment starts to be enough. You can still look forward to things. You can still plan, but you are no longer spending your actual life waiting for your real life to begin.

Milestones Are Not the Measure

There is another trap worth naming: measuring the success of a life by its milestones. The graduation, the promotion, the house, the car. These are visible markers that we have been trained to value, and there is nothing wrong with achieving them. The problem is when they become the only measure, because what happens the morning after you reach one is that life is just normal again, usually with more responsibilities and a new ladder to climb.

The Stoics offered a different measure. The practice of memento mori asks not whether you reached the milestone but whether, if today were the last day, you feel you have lived it well. Not comfortably, not successfully by external measures, but with intention, with honesty, with something close to who you actually are.

That is a measure that does not require the milestone to arrive. It is available in every ordinary day, if the day is being lived in the right direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you design your life according to Stoicism?

Stoicism starts with values rather than goals. Before deciding what to pursue, it asks who you are and what you genuinely care about. Once those are clear, every decision becomes easier because you know what you are deciding toward. The Stoics used the image of the sage as a direction rather than a destination: you may never fully arrive, but the direction shapes every step. Deliberate small choices made consistently in alignment with your values are how a well-designed life is built.

What did Seneca mean by “life is long if you know how to use it”?

Seneca was pushing back against the common complaint that life is too short. His argument was that most people feel this way not because their lives are brief but because they spend so much of their time on things that do not matter to them: distraction, other people’s agendas, waiting for conditions to be right. The person who lives with attention and intention, spending their time on what genuinely matters to them, will find life long enough. The person who gives it away carelessly will reach the end wondering where it went.

How do I start designing my life around my values?

Start with the elevator pitch question: if you had to describe your life to someone in thirty seconds, what would you want to be able to say? Not the job title, not the possessions. What kind of life, and what would make it feel well spent? Once you have something honest, look at how your current days compare. The gap between what you would say and how you are actually living is where the design work begins. It does not require dramatic change. It requires consistent small decisions made in the right direction.

Does Stoicism say we should plan for the future?

Yes, but with what the Stoics called the reserve clause: plan with full intention, while accepting that outcomes are subject to fate. Having a direction for your life, a sense of where you are heading and why, is entirely consistent with Stoicism. What the Stoics resist is attaching your wellbeing to whether the plan works out exactly as hoped. You can work toward something with full commitment while staying at peace with whatever actually happens.

Why do the Stoics say life is not too short?

Because the complaint that life is short is almost always a complaint about how it has been spent, not how long it has been. Seneca’s point is that we receive enough time. What we do with it is the question. The Stoics had enough time: Epictetus built a school and shaped philosophy for centuries. Marcus Aurelius governed an empire and wrote the Meditations. Seneca wrote more than any other Stoic whose work survives. None of them had more hours in a day than we do. They simply used them differently.

Design Your Life for the Present

Designing your life does not mean having everything figured out. It means knowing what you are working toward and being grateful for what is already here. Those two things together, a direction and a presence, are what the Stoics were pointing at.

Life is not too short. We spend most of it elsewhere. The Stoics had enough time because they knew where they were spending it and why. That is available to us too, if we are willing to ask the question honestly and then let the answer shape what comes next.

Design your life for the present, with your future in mind, and be grateful for the moment you have right now.

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Want to Learn More?

If this resonated and you are ready to start building your own philosophy of life, a conversation with Benny as your Stoic coach can be a good place to begin. Not to be told what to think, but to have the space to figure it out. You can also sign up for the newsletter, The Pause, or watch or listen to the Via Stoica Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

About the Author

Benny Voncken is the founder of Via Stoica and host of the Via Stoica Podcast. He has practiced Stoicism as a way of life for over six years, spoken at Stoicon, and led Stoic walks across Europe. Through Stoic coaching, he helps people use Stoic principles and practices to develop their own philosophy of life: one that gives them the tools to face obstacles, navigate change, and find more balance and peace. He writes, teaches, and walks wherever the philosophy takes him.