ReadGlobe · morning brief · archive
Sunday 25 October
1 · The text
Life is long enough, if you know how to use it
He goes down the list of how men spend themselves — on money, on wine, on other people's opinions — and finds the time was never the thing in short supply.
3 min · Seneca · Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency · tr. Aubrey Stewart · 1889 translation · public domain
Why do we complain of Nature? she has dealt kindly with us. Life is long enough, if you know how to use it. One man is possessed by an avarice which nothing can satisfy, another by a laborious diligence in doing what is totally useless: another is sodden by wine: another is benumbed by sloth: one man is exhausted by an ambition which makes him court the good will of others: another, through his eagerness as a merchant, is led to visit every land and every sea by the hope of gain: some are plagued by the love of soldiering, and are always either endangering other men’s lives or in trembling for their own: some wear away their lives in that voluntary slavery, the unrequited service of great men: many are occupied either in laying claim to other men’s fortune or in complaining of their own: a great number have no settled purpose, and are tossed from one new scheme to another by a rambling, inconsistent, dissatisfied, fickle habit of mind: some care for no object sufficiently to try to attain it, but lie lazily yawning until their fate comes upon them: so that I cannot doubt the truth of that verse which the greatest of poets has dressed in the guise of an oracular response—
“We live a small part only of our lives.”
But all duration is time, not life: vices press upon us and surround us on every side, and do not permit us to regain our feet, or to raise our eyes and gaze upon truth, but when we are down keep us prostrate and chained to low desires. Men who are in this condition are never allowed to come to themselves: if ever by chance they obtain any rest, they roll to and fro like the deep sea, which heaves and tosses after a gale, and they never have any respite from their lusts. Do you suppose that I speak of those whose ills are notorious? Nay, look at those whose prosperity all men run to see: they are choked by their own good things. To how many men do riches prove a heavy burden? how many men’s eloquence and continual desire to display their own cleverness has cost them their lives? how many are sallow with constant sensual indulgence? how many have no freedom left them by the tribe of clients that surges around them? Look through all these, from the lowest to the highest:—this man calls his friends to support him, this one is present in court, this one is the defendant, this one pleads for him, this one is on the jury: but no one lays claim to his own self, every one wastes his time over some one else. Investigate those men, whose names are in every one’s mouth: you will find that they bear just the same marks: A is devoted to B, and B to C: no one belongs to himself. Moreover some men are full of most irrational anger: they complain of the insolence of their chiefs, because they have not granted them an audience when they wished for it; as if a man had any right to complain of being so haughtily shut out by another, when he never has leisure to give his own conscience a hearing. This chief of yours, whoever he is, though he may look at you in an offensive manner, still will some day look at you, open his ears to your words, and give you a seat by his side: but you never design to look upon yourself, to listen to your own grievances. You ought not, then, to claim these services from another, especially since while you yourself were doing so, you did not wish for an interview with another man, but were not able to obtain one with yourself.
2 · One idea · Cognitive psychology
The Dunning–Kruger effect
The people who did worst thought they had done rather well.
Picture a room of students handing in a test, then guessing how they ranked against everyone else. Justin Kruger and David Dunning ran studies like that and looked hardest at the bottom quarter.
Those students' scores put them in the 12th percentile. They placed themselves in the 62nd. Not geniuses, in their own eyes. Simply above average.
Researchers still argue about how much of the gap is statistics rather than psychology. The core puzzle survives: judging whether an answer is right takes much of the same skill as getting it right.
In one line. The Dunning–Kruger effect is the finding that people with the least skill in an area tend to overrate their ability most — because the knowledge needed to do a task well is the same knowledge needed to judge how well you’re doing it. Competence and the ability to see your own incompetence arrive together.
Worked example
In the original studies, people scoring in the bottom quarter on grammar and logic estimated themselves near the 60th percentile. They weren’t lying — they simply couldn’t recognise their own mistakes, because recognising them required the very skill they lacked.
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
Median age, world
195022.2 years
202330.4 years
1.4 times the 1950 level.
Half the world is younger than this; the number shapes everything from jobs to pensions.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.