Claim it before someone else spends it

Think about what you call "mine." The job can end Friday. The car gets repossessed, the lease runs out, the savings vanish in one bad month. Even your body is on loan and aging by the hour. Strip it all back and one thing remains that no employer issued and no creditor can seize: the time you are living through right now.

In his first letter to a friend, Seneca makes a quiet, startling claim — that of everything we think we own, time is the only thing truly ours, and even it gets taken from us constantly. Not stolen by thieves. Given away. Handed to whoever asks, in scraps, until the day is full of other people's priorities and empty of our own (Letters 1, paraphrase).

That's the part worth sitting with. Your hours don't usually get robbed. You spend them, distractedly, on whatever's loudest. The line cook pulled into a fourth double, the driver who can't say no to one more run, the manager whose calendar belongs to everyone but herself — each gave the hours away rather than lost them.

So claim them. Gather what's left and guard it like the only property you actually hold, because it is.