But you gotta have friends!

Wikipedia defines "friendship" as "the cooperative and supportive relationship between two or more people." As I have been reading Seneca, specifically his letters on friendship, it seems rather ridiculous that such a complex thing can be defined so dryly. We can see amazing examples not just in humans, but in life and nature all around us. In his letters, Seneca spends a good amount of time talking about friendship and the amount of importance we should or should not place on it. In Letter IX, "The wise man is content with himself and therefore needs no friend." However, he goes on to talk about the kinds of friendships we should invest ourselves in. He spends a lot of time emphasizing the importance of making friends essential to our lives, even though later in the same letter, he says "The wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle." Seneca is not an advocate of being lonely or miserable; rather, he is very realistic about the expectations that we should place on ourselves. We are told our whole lives (or at least I have been taught) to not allow people or circumstances dictate our happiness, but rather to decide our own happiness and make sure that we live our lives our in a way that will provide us with the happiness we wish for.
In "On The Shortness of Life," Seneca writes: "In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone from the company of older men and say: “I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, how much with a mistress, how much with a patron, how much with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count." This prompts a lot of thought into the idea of who we allow into our lives and call a friend. According to Seneca, our time is the most precious thing that we possess, yet it is the thing that we are the most willing to give away. We should be much more careful with who we allow to take our time away from us, and because of this, we should be extra careful in deciding who is in possession of the majority of our time.
Friendship has always been one of the most important things in my life. My good friends have come and gone and changed over the years, but the importance of my friends in my life has never changed. I cherish my few close friendships more than anything in the world, but I also somewhat understand and agree with Seneca's opinion that a wise man is content with himself. In Letter IX, he says, "Self-contented as he is, then, he does need friends - and wants as many of them as possible - but not to enable him to lead a happy life; this he will have even without friends." It is a good notion that we should learn to be content with our lives even without friends, and that friends simply add something extra to our lives; however, I have seen in my life just how difficult it is to truly be without friends. Seneca encourages us to evaluate our lives, our time, our day, and our belongings, but perhaps we should also evaluate our true happiness aside from our cherished friendships. I think we would find that most of what we consider to be our "true" happiness lies in the people that we surround ourselves with. It seems as though, for most people, myself included, if friends were removed from their lives they would not know how to function. And after reading Seneca's ideas, I wonder how good of a thing this is. Should we be so attached to the people in our lives that we cannot even function or be happy without them? Seneca would say no. We should be perfectly content on our own.
But I say that friends are essential to life. They are who we depend on to help us with problems, guide us through crises, celebrate with us, cry with us, and spend time with us in general. God made mankind for a reason, and he gave us the feelings and emotions that we have for a reason, including the place that we have in our heart for relationships. Because of this, we are supposed to have friendships and invest ourselves in other people. The feeling of friendship is something that is innate in all of us, from the time we are children and find that one person that we want to play on the playground with. Our human nature itself needs friendship. In my opinion, Seneca's ideas about this are only half-right. I believe that we should not allow people or circumstances to dictate our true happiness, but it is definitely essential to our quality of life to have friends to walk through life with. Studies have even shown that friends play a major role in our physical and mental health. It has been proven that human touch and connection is vital to our lives and well-being, as those studied who have not had these things either died or had otherwise tragic lives. We also must change our view on life in order to have good friends and be a good friend. When we are involved in any kind of relationship with a person, our thoughts should shift from "me" to "we." If we form these relationships with people whom we have judged to be good friends to us and whom we have decided to trust, according to Seneca, we will have successful friendships that will truly positively add to our lives. Our lives are short; why waste them with people who don't uplift us and who add to the quality of our life?

What if we don't live forever?

"On The Shortness of Life," Seneca writes: "You will hear many men saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!"

The future is a scary place to a lot of people, yet it is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about, talking about, worrying about, and planning for. We spend so much time thinking about the future that we sometimes forget to focus at all on the present. This is a strange thought, since most of us don't have the slightest idea what we want to do with our lives, and even if we say we do, our plans will most likely change a million times in the course of our life. Different stages of life give us different aspirations of what we want to do or accomplish in our time here, especially concerning a career. If you ask a 10-year-old what he wants to be, he will most likely say that he dreams of being a doctor, fireman, astronaut, or something equally exciting and impressive. However, as the years go on and we grow and mature, we begin to realize that some of these aspirations may not be attainable after all. In a scene from one of my favorite movie, Mr. Deeds, Longfellow Deeds says: "We all had these dreams, and then we got jobs to achieve those dreams. But we wanted more money, and we got rid of our dreams. You know, if your nine-year olds saw you guys the way you are, you'd get your butts kicked right now! I mean, look what's happened to us!"

As we grow and mature, we realize our own limits that we were unaware of when our parents told us as children that we could be anything in the whole world. Sooner or later, we learn that we may not have the money, the means, or the brains to accomplish some of our lofty career goals and our true passions. We become less concerned with our true dreams and ambitions and more concerned with what will be the most convenient thing for us to attain that will earn us a lot of money. We do this because we are under the impression that the future will always be there. We find ourselves saying "Well, I have my whole life to do what I want to do, so I'll just take this job right now that will make me a lot of money and then I can do what really makes me happy later." We live under the assumption that we will live until we are 80 years old, so we can wait to be happy. But what happened to the notion of being happy now, of enjoying life when you're young, of living as if you'll die tomorrow? We live with such high expectations of how long we will have to accomplish our goals, and we may all of a sudden one day find ourselves at the end of our lives and have nothing left to look forward to and having accomplished nothing. What if we lived with a shorter expectation of our life? Right now, one of my personal options for a career is Physical Therapy. I will probably spend the next three years of my life in a graduate school learning about the practice of Physical Therapy so that I can spend the rest of my life being useful to the world and earning money so that I can support the family I plan on having some day. I did not choose this because I necessarily dream of being a Physical Therapist, but because it was something I was mildly interested in and I knew it would be a secure job that I could financially support myself with. I assume I will need to support myself for the approximately 60 years I have left to live, and I find myself saying, "I can do this for a career and then do what I love on the side as a hobby." But what if I don't live that long? What if I pour so much of myself into going to Physical Therapy school and becoming good at what I do and making a career for myself that I don't have any time left over to do what I love? What happens when we spend so much time and effort becoming something that we don't care too much about and we don't have time to do what we love and are passionate about? How long will I have to wait to be happy? Personally, after thinking about this possibility of living for as long as I sometimes expect, I have begun to question my motives and plans for my life. What if I planned my life according to the possibility of my life ending at 40 or 50?
I know how I would change my life. It's simple. I would stop worrying about finding a job that is impressive, or grown-up sounding, or that will reward me with a lot of money, and start remembering that child I used to be that desired nothing more than to simply be happy and enjoy my life. I have begun to reevaluate what I want to do with my life and how I want to spend the next few years of my life preparing for it. After a long time of telling myself that I should find another career doing something I don't necessarily love in order to support myself, and let everything else that I love find a place in my life, I have realized that what I am planning on doing with my life has nothing to do with anything I am passionate about. One of my true passions is photography. I could photograph all day and never tire. I have seriously considered making this my career, but only did this for a short time before I realized that photography is not one of the most sensible or economically supportive job I could find. But now thinking about the possibility of not living as long as I expect, and pondering the idea of what would happen if I lived for only 20 more years instead of 60, there is no way that I would ever spend my time on a career that I hated or didn't love with all my heart. There is no doubt in my mind that if I only had 20 more years to live, I would be a photographer tomorrow. Instead of choosing a career that I hated and letting my passions find their way somewhere in my life, I would follow my passions and trust that they will support me comfortably.
One article discusses the key to having success in a career. It is simple: Doing something you love. It says that "If you hate your job, the chances are you’re doing the wrong thing. This isn’t just bad for you in the here and now – it’s bad for your long-term career prospects too. If you’re not happy, you’re not going to go the whole nine yards – which means that you’ll be treading water. Your career will falter and stagnate." There is no way that a person who is unhappy in their career can possibly be successful, so the whole notion of doing something you don't love with the idea of maybe being happy and being able to do something you love in the future, is a complete waste. One of my biggest fears in my life is having regrets, and I am realizing through reading Seneca's letters the importance of doing something you love with your life, instead of wasting your time with something convenient that will simply provide you with money. Who says we have to wait to start our lives? Who says we have to wait to retire to be able to truly enjoy where we're at and what we're doing? I truly believe that I, and everyone else, would be much happier if we took Seneca's advice and focused their time on living in the moment, doing something that we love, and by accomplishing this through the careers that we choose. If we're not happy in what we are doing, are we truly living? Seneca, and I, would say no. So do something you love, and LIVE.