🏛️ My workshop, “How to Decide Like a Stoic” is this Friday. It costs $30 and if you want to know EXACTLY how to make choices “the Stoic way,” I would suggest you not miss it. Register by clicking here. Yes, it’s recorded.
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Your bank statements have nothing to do with this sort of poverty.
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
Seneca isn't being poetic here — he means what he says literally.
Poverty, in the Stoic sense, is not a figure on a bank statement but a condition of the mind. Specifically, it's the condition of wanting something you don't have so badly that it causes you to choose viciously (in violation of reason and Nature).
Think of the last time you got the thing you'd been working toward (the salary increase, the holiday, the new car, whatever) and then, fairly quickly, found yourself wanting the next thing.
The wanting didn't stop, did it? It just relocated, didn’t it?
That’s the poverty Seneca is describing.
And one more thing: the person with considerably less than you who isn't particularly bothered about acquiring more is, by this measure, richer (if, that is, you are enslaved by your desire for more).
And, again, this isn’t metaphorical. We’re talking about wealth in the only sense the Stoics thought mattered: freedom from the anxiety of wanting.
Thanks for reading.
Stay hungry. Stay wise. Eat brekkie.
