How a career leaks away

Ask someone thirty years into the trade where the time went and watch the pause. The years didn't vanish in one dramatic stretch. They drained — a slow shift here, a season of just-getting-through there, a decade of meaning to make a change and never quite doing it. The leak is quiet. That's why it works.

Seneca saw the same thing in Rome. Life is long enough, he said, "but when it all runs to waste through luxury and carelessness, when it is not devoted to any good purpose, then at the last we are forced to feel that it is all over, although we never noticed how it glided away" (Of the Shortness of Life I, Stewart). Glided. Not stolen at knifepoint — slipped past while you were busy with something that felt urgent at the time and that you can't even name now.

The warehouse picker, the salon owner, the parent who has not had a full weekend since the first kid: all of them are spending the same nonrenewable thing, and most of the spending goes unwatched. The view from above shows you the whole arc at once. From up there the leak is obvious. Down here it hides inside ordinary days.