Living life on auto pilot for certain points and moments actually is not the default way of existence, it's just the one many of us are most used to. I would highly recommend considering some mindfulness exercises or meditation. You'll begin to appreciate how much of the day you can live fully and attentively.

I highly disagree. Living life on auto pilot seem to be default. Its all over our biology on every level because 'mindfulness' takes a lot of scarce energy.

Yet people run marathons, body build, invest themselves into work using an unbelievable amount of scarce energy.

Minimizing energy expenditure is called laziness for a reason.

You will learn the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret, as I've heard it said.

Minimizing energy expenditure is called efficiency.

>This is way way more prominent today than 2k years ago since in single day you are exposed to more information then for entire life back then.

Most of that information is irrelevant to your everyday life, and so the net actionable average is about the same as then.

>Lets get serious: Seneca, Buddha, Jesus, whoever, are irrelevant. Context changed dramatically.

LOL, not even close.

Not sure why you think this is a new problem. If you read more of Seneca, Buddhism, or Jesus' thought, you'll see this is part of the reason they talk about awareness, giving up your possessions, not running around doing useless tasks. They had a lot more insight into human nature than you appear to realize.

Yeah, in human nature existing in the world 2k years ago.

OK, take Hyperion book for example, do you think Seneca would be meaningful with all sort of 'technological distortions' existing in such world ?

Even more so.

Are humans really designed to live life in auto-mode, of is that a byproduct of living in a modern society? Philosophers of the past may not have been exposed to the same amounts of information we take for granted daily, but biologically there's very little difference between them and us.

I can identify with the Seneca quote, mainly for it's perspective that time is a resource to be spent, and potentially invested. Seems truer today than ever.

What do you mean 'biologically'? Genome? Epigenome? Wings?

I bet some of those differ a lot (hint: not wings:)

We don't exist in vacuum: humans live among and with and as hosts for other creatures, and there is also environment that literally plays most important role.

> I can identify with the Seneca quote, mainly for it's perspective that time is a resource to be spent, and potentially invested.

Yeah, everything can be awesome in theory with little word or number massage. In real life, its usually not.

LOL ok.

Let’s get serious: more people still follow Buddha or Jesus today than follow Paul Graham or Steve Jobs ...

At least they're not following Zuckerberg ...

Most people will always follow, its also deep inside our programming.

I was replying to the part of your comment where you claimed that these things were “not relevant”.

How can they be not relevant if they still affect people existing in the world we see today?

Because some memes become entrenched? Even when they're hopelessly outdated and require lots of filtering or creative interpretation.

Relevant as in for the current topic.

Not relevant as in influence. Bugs influence me too, but its not relevant most of the time.

“All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls” — 1 Peter 1:24

“Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.

So is all conditioned existence to be seen.” —Diamond Sutra

Do you really think that we have accomplished more as a society and technologically or are exposed to more everyday than the Romans 2 thousands years ago?

Living the way we live is a modern invention, it has no more than 150 years, and it's already collapsing

Meanwhile Romans built a city where a million and a half people lived and acqueducts to bring running clean water to all of them

They built roads to go to every part of the empire and bring back to Rome thousands of tons of construction materials, mainly marble

That they than used to build giant buildings that only many centuries later have been copied successfully

They built ships to go to Africa and bring back to Rome elephants, tigers, lions, giraffes, rhinoceros, ippos and many other wild animals, alive!

Imagine going in the streets of a modern city and meet an elephant, an animal that nowadays people rarely see in real life and think again about experiencing more than people in the past

They did it for 450 years and did it so well that there are no elephants or lions in northern Africa anymore

They were probably the best engineers and sokdiers in history, the Colosseum was built in mere 8 years

But

Their way of life was "otium et negotium" even if you don't know what they mean, neg-otium is clearly the negation of the world otium

They were the foundation of Romans success, they worked half a day (negotium) and spent the rest of the day in idleness (otium)

It was obviously different from today idea of "doing nothing at all" it meant more something like if you are free from the obligations of life, you can engage in intellectual activities

They spent a lot of time not doing any kind of work or duty related stuff and yet achieved so much

Only many centuries later the work became something organized that must be carried on during certain hours (shifts) in certain places for a certain amount of money

So basically in ancient history most of the times people never really worked continuosly on the same thing and valued a lot their free time as a way to improve themselves, if their condition allowed it

We must be very careful when we think that we have more time or have seen more things or are more advanced than ancient civilization

Seneca was very modern, he discovered something universal about human struggle between certainty of death and the mundane uneventful life that most of us live and that's why his ideas survived

He certainly wasn't stupid and certainly the average human of today is not more intelligent than Seneca just because they read more news on social networks...

Auto pilot is not really what I would describe life in ancient times

That's a modern idea probably best depicted by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, that was in fact shot in 1925 when the effects of the mass industrialization were becoming clear

Trivia: the tower of Babel in metropolis is modelled around this painting by Pieter Bruegel

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the...

where the tower of Babel is painted as recursive Colosseums, one inside the other, to express the idea that the Romans tried to reach god and were punished for their hubris (there is more to that, the Colosseum was also a place that symbolised persecution for Christians)

> We must be very careful when we think that we have more time or have seen more things or are more advanced than ancient civilization

We have definitely seen more things. I think that is beyond questioning.

Being more advanced is questionable, especially because that term means something different for any human.

But the point is that wisdom from that time can not IMO be translated verbatim to current time - you can peak pieces of it but not rely on it as truth 100%. Both life expectations and habits and priorities are totally different now that makes any wisdom arised from such system distant and foggy.

> We have definitely seen more things. I think that is beyond questioning.

The average human has seen more of contemporary things but will never see what we lost, on average I will say the quantity is the same, they are simply different things

> wisdom from that time can not IMO be translated verbatim to current time

Wisdom of that time could not be translated verbatim not even when they were fresh ideas

That kind of wisdom was acknowledged only among a marginal fraction of the population that had the instruments to understand it and argue about it

Let alone applying it, you had to be someone in complete control of their lives, a thing that was extremely rare

We are talking about less than 1% of the population, something around one every ten thousands

But probably even less that that

It has more chances of being popular today than at the time it was formulated

I don't get how what you are saying is related with either Seneca or what PG wrote.

Do you believe that we don't have much time (because we cannot do otherwise)?