When Night Becomes Day — Letters from a Stoic

The day has already shrunk, and the people who sleep through it are not simply lazy, they are living backwards. Letter 122 opens with Seneca's observation that the day itself is shortening with the season, but that rising with it still gives you enough. The real target is a specific kind of Roman excess: the people who have inverted their hours so completely that they go to bed at dawn and wake at nightfall.

He is not merely criticising late sleepers. He is describing a whole way of orienting oneself to life, one that mistakes notoriety for distinction, and treats the reversal of nature's order as a kind of sophistication. These men are like Antipodes living in the same city: their country of the mind is directly opposite to ours.

Do they know how to live, if they do not know when to live? Do they fear death, if they have buried themselves alive? The letter closes with its instruction simply stated: keep to the way Nature has mapped out.

If we follow Nature, all is easy and unobstructed. If we combat her, our life is no different from men rowing against the current.