Hermione Eyre: If you don't think philosophy can make you happy, you haven't read Seneca

How do you fit everything in? There's so much out there. Every day the paper recommends another film you mustn't miss, a book you have to read. Every article leads to a link to another; every TV programme ends with a trailer. Missing a programme isn't an excuse any more. You can catch everything again online. Every day ends too soon; isn't life desperately short for living?

"Life is long enough if you know how to use it." Really? I liked the quiet, reassuring authority of the title. I picked up the book. "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it." I thought of the hours I spent browsing Facebook. "You are living as if destined to live forever... You act like mortals in all that you fear, but immortals in all that you desire." Yes, that was it: my desire to watch every programme on the BBC iplayer summed up in one sentence.

In diagnosing my problem, Seneca (for it was he) had just made it feel a little bit lighter. His advice had an old-fashioned frame of reference – analogies about Corinthian bronzes and the like – but God, it was good: "Men do not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms; but they allow others to encroach on their lives. People are frugal in guarding their personal property, but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the thing in which it is right to be stingy."

Seneca covered every modern malaise of time management, from the time-poor cash-rich ("You will notice how the most powerful and highly stationed men let drop remarks in which they pray for leisure") to the furious networkers whose priorities are all wrong ("X cultivates Y and Y cultivates X – no one bothers about himself").

I read greedily, with a pure self-interest. I didn't learn anything about Seneca from it, nor gain any scholarly insight into the classical tradition. I was shamelessly exploiting an ancient philosopher as a self-help book. It isn't big, or clever, but it is very satisfying, and a genuine comfort. No wonder the practical philosophy movement, led by that tireless cheerleader for the ancients, Alain de Botton, gathers pace all the time.

This month a new series of books promising to mine the "untapped resource" of classical philosophy in nine short volumes on The Art of Living is published by Acumen; simultaneously The School of Life is offering courses on how to think about love, work, religion and play.

Good luck to them. It isn't intellectual snobbery that means it's ok for the chattering classes to read Seneca but not M Scott Peck, just the fact that time is a great filter – the best there is for charlatans and cod-philosophical spam.

Here's to prime-time Cambridge

We are beginning to see a benign side to product placement. First, Shane Meadows' film Somers Town was funded by Eurostar while retaining 99 per cent artistic integrity. Now Cambridge University is seeking to get a positive plug on a popular TV soap. The University has approached scriptwriters on Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Eastenders in the hope that they will include a plotline about a character winning one of their "generous student support packages". It's a wonderful idea, but not without risks. Scriptwriters love misery and might easily end up accidentally reinforcing old stereotypes. And advertising the generosity of the college in natural dialogue will be hard to do. "He's only gone and got himself an access scheme bursary with added pastoral care," is unlikely to trip off the tongue of even as gifted and actor as Patsy Palmer.

* Howard Hodgkin's latest work isn't just a gorgeous explosion of colour, it is a portrait of a well-known cultural mandarin. It isn't sombre enough for Nick Serota; he is many things, but not turquoise. Charles Samaurez-Smith in a hurry, perhaps? Alice Rawsthorne on a bad hair day?

It is in fact the artistic director of the ICA Ekow Eshun. Ekow was painted from life in 2008, specially for the ICA's 60th anniversary. As with all Hodgkin's work, the claim of representation made by the title (that green li ne and pink squiggle is Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi? Really?) sounds audacious at first, but is actually the key that unlocks the painting. Slowly, stealthily, it starts to cohere into an atmospheric kind of meaning. I can hear the squeak that comes into Ekow Eshun's voice when he gets enthusiastic abou t something, see those excited hand gestures he used to make when describing something on Newsnight Review. Hodgkin stretches abstraction as far as it will go towards representation, and gives us a wonderful dose of colour therapy in the process.

I can't think of a more cheering sight than this work when it goes on display at the ICA on 11 September. The fact that entrance to the bar and gallery there is now free of charge is the cherry on the cake – or rather, the red blob on the white scumbling.

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