Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living

CHAPTER 6

How to Tame Adversity

THE CITY THAT DISAPPEARED IN A FLASH

In the summer of the year 64, Seneca received some terrible news from a friend. The Roman colony of Lugdunum—the modern-day city of Lyon, France—had suddenly burned to the ground in a freak fire. Adding to the shock, the city was destroyed in just a few minutes. Seneca called the fire at Lyon “so unexpected and unheard of, because it was without precedent.”1 As he pointed out, it is rare for fires to consume everything so fiercely that nothing is left behind.

Seneca devotes an entire missive, Letter 91, to the destruction of Lyon by fire. In terms of the powerful feelings it evokes, it’s one of his most compelling works. He lyrically describes the frailty of everything created by humans and by nature, and how things can turn into their opposites almost instantly. Peace turns into war, a calm day into a terrible storm. Prosperity collapses into poverty, health into illness. The accomplishments of an entire lifetime can be lost in a single day. An hour is enough time to destroy an empire. “The reality,” he writes, “is that things develop slowly, but the way to ruin comes quickly.”2

The fire of Lyon moved so quickly, and was so unexpected, the city didn’t stand a chance. But misfortune isn’t uncommon. It’s destined to strike us all.

While all of the Roman Stoics wrote about how to handle adversity, Seneca was the master of this subject. He addressed it widely across hundreds of pages. This question, How should we respond when bad things happen to good people?, never goes out of style, because the need to confront adversity is part of human nature. Even the richest and most privileged among us cannot avoid pain and suffering, the occasional mishap, and the feeling that things have taken a wrong turn. In fact, Seneca’s wise teachings on adversity contribute significantly to the popularity of his writings today. During the worldwide lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic, during which I wrote part of this book, many book sales were in steep decline due to the impact of halting the world economy. But during the first peak of the pandemic, sales of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic soared 747 percent higher than usual.3 During this highly stressful period, Seneca’s teachings about how to live calmly, despite adversity, attracted many new readers.

VIRTUE AND EQUANIMITY: HOW STOICS FIND GOODNESS DESPITE ADVERSITY

Don’t desire hardships, but the virtue that allows you to endure hardships.

—Seneca, Letters 15.5

We live in an unpredictable world—a world in which we will all experience adversity, hardship, and suffering. How, then, were the Stoics able to live calm and happy lives?

Based on common sense, the Stoics knew that adversity and hardships are just part of life, so they developed ways to anticipate and respond to these inevitable experiences. But most importantly, it was their underlying way of looking at the world that took away the emotional sting most people feel when misfortunes cross their paths. In other words, the Stoics learned how to see the world in a slightly different way than the average person, making hardships feel less painful.

Ultimately, the Stoics believed that a person with a well-developed character would be able to endure adversity with a glad or happy mind. As we saw in chapter 4, this doesn’t mean that a Stoic won’t experience normal human feelings. But how, the Stoics asked, can we look at the world to prevent those feelings from turning into something extremely negative or debilitating?

We can find the answer in two key Stoic ideas mentioned briefly in the introduction to this book. The first Stoic belief is that virtue, or inner excellence, is the only true good. The second belief is that some things are “up to us” and other things aren’t, so we should focus on the things that are actually within our control.

It’s now time to take a more in-depth look at these ideas and how they can work together to ease human suffering.

The word virtue, unfortunately, sounds stuffy and Victorian. But what virtue or aretē meant to the ancient Greeks was simply “goodness” or “excellence.” Even an inanimate object can possess excellence. For example, the aretē or excellence of a good knife is that it’s sharp and cuts well. The virtue of a good horse might be that it’s strong and fast. Once we reach the level of human beings, the thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we’re rational. So for the Stoics, to possess virtue as a human being, we must act in a rational, reasonable, or honorable way. This means we should develop a good and stable character, characterized by equanimity, in which extreme negative emotions don’t cause us to lose our mental balance.

Aside from being rational, there are many other virtues. Going back at least to Plato, the Greeks identified four primary or “cardinal” virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, which the Stoics also saw as essential.

The second key idea is that some things are “up to us” or within our power, while others are not. Modern Stoics call this the dichotomy of control, and it’s central to all of Roman Stoicism.4 When you think about it carefully, however, there is very little under our total control. Even our bodies and thoughts are not under our control at all times.

To give another example, while we can control our intentions, we can’t control the outcomes of things. If you start a business, you might be able to get everything just right in terms of the marketing, which you could, in theory, have total control over. But the company might fail for millions of other reasons, including the possibility that there just isn’t enough demand for what the business is offering.

Today, the Stoic philosopher most famous for writing about the dichotomy of control is Epictetus, who was a teenager when Seneca died. But Seneca and earlier Stoics accepted this idea too; they just described it in different ways. Seneca spoke of virtue and Fortune.* For Seneca, virtue (and our inner character) is up to us, but Fortune or chance is not. (See figure 4.) While we should always try to make good use of the things outside of our control (to help create a better world), we should focus first on having a good character, because without virtue or a good character, we won’t be able to create anything good in the world either. As Seneca wrote, “Virtue itself is the only good, since nothing is good without it.”5

The Dichotomy of Control

Seneca

Virtue / Inner Character

Fortune or Chance

Epictetus

“Up to us”

“Not up to us”

Fig. 4: How Seneca and Epictetus described the dichotomy of control. While virtue and inner character are “up to us” and under our control, things in the domain of Fortune or chance are not fully up to us.

In Stoic philosophy, these two ideas—that virtue is the only true good and that some things are outside of our control—are like two powerful chemical substances. When they are combined and mixed together, an intense reaction occurs, and an entirely new way of viewing the world comes into being.

ONE MAIN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN an average person and a Stoic is that an average person sees external things—things such as having money, a lovely home, and a beautiful family—as being goods, while for a Stoic they are only seen as being advantages. At first, this might seem like a small difference, or even a verbal quibble. But for a Stoic, this is a crucial distinction, because virtue is the only true good. (That said, if possible, a Stoic will want to have external advantages, just like everyone else.)

For Seneca, “All the things under the power of chance are servants,” including money, the body, reputation, and most other things.6 As he explains, anyone who believes external things to be good puts himself under the power of Fortune, chance, and things outside his control. But the person who understands goodness to be a virtue can find lasting happiness within, regardless of external circumstances.7

For a Stoic, anything that’s a real good, like virtue, can never be taken away from us, while anything that can be taken away is not a real good—it’s just an advantage, or a gift of Fortune. “It’s a mistake,” Seneca wrote, “to believe that anything good or bad is given to us by Fortune.” Rather, Fortune just gives us the raw material for creating good or bad, based on the good or bad qualities within us.8 Similarly, when speaking to his students, the Stoic teacher Epictetus stressed this point forcefully: “Don’t search outside yourselves for what is good; seek it within, or you will never find it.”9

WHILE BELIEVING THAT MONEY, good health, friends and family, and many other things are advantages we should actively seek out, the Stoics believed that advantages are valuable, but refused to call them “goods.” But why did they make this distinction? Part of the answer goes back to Aristotle, who claimed that to lead a truly good or happy life, you also needed “external goods” like health, a certain amount of money, and even good looks. (Aristotle, by the way, was the sharp-dressing son of a wealthy father, who was the court physician to the king of Macedonia.)

To the Stoics, though, Aristotle’s belief was absurd, because many people, with age, will lose many or all of these external goods. For example, let’s imagine that you develop an excellent moral character over your entire life, but that at a certain age you lose your wealth, your health, your family, and suddenly find yourself facing death. Would that suddenly mean, at this point, that your life is no longer good, or that you’ve lost your moral character? Of course not. And what about “good looks”? Socrates, who was considered to have been one of the most virtuous people who ever lived, was legendary for looking ugly. People said that Socrates, with his famous pug nose, resembled a satyr.

By insisting that virtue is the only true good, the Stoics affirmed a radical egalitarianism. While it’s better for someone to have obvious advantages, even if you’re poor, sick, ugly, or dying, it’s still entirely possible for you to be a good and virtuous person. And regardless of your circumstances in life, it’s still possible to find some way to study philosophy. As Seneca wrote, anyone can develop excellence of mind, if they so desire: “Philosophy doesn’t exclude or select anyone. Its light shines for all.”10

REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR not you are personally drawn to Stoic ways of thinking, I hope you can now see how these two ideas, when combined, are so powerful. If someone truly adopted the Stoic ideas that “virtue is the only true good” and “many things are outside of our control,” this would produce a significant shift in the way most people view and experience the world. And that shift would make any external misfortunes feel much less terrible. Regardless of that, we can summarize Seneca’s idea about the relationship between misfortune and virtue in a simple formula: it’s not what we bear, but how we bear it that matters. While any adversity could strike us, it’s how we respond that is a measure of our true character.

PREPARING FOR ADVERSITY

If you don’t want someone to panic during a crisis, train him or her beforehand.

—Seneca, Letters 18.6

One Stoic approach to reduce the sting of adverse events is called praemeditatio malorum, “the premeditation of future adversity.” This involves briefly rehearsing potential negative events in your mind before they occur. Should the event then actually take place in the future, you’ll be mentally prepared for it, and the emotional shock will be significantly reduced. While this technique doesn’t work for everyone and could cause anxiety instead (in which case you shouldn’t use it), it has worked exceptionally well for me and for many others. In fact, everyone already has experimented with this who has experienced a fire drill as a schoolchild. Rehearsing a potential disaster in advance increases your ability to cope and think clearly should the imagined disaster ever take place.

Speaking of fire drills, Seneca offers this exact advice to Lucilius, after describing the terrible destruction of Lyon by fire:

When one doesn’t anticipate a disaster, it weighs more heavily on us. Shock strengthens the impact, and every mortal feels more profound grief when left in astonishment. Therefore, nothing should be unexpected by us. We should send our minds ahead in advance, and we should consider not just what typically happens but what could happen.11

Or even more strongly, as he writes elsewhere, “Let us think of anything that could happen as something that will happen.”12

The basic idea behind the premeditation of adversity is to briefly rehearse any possible misfortune in your imagination—like you’re practicing or exercising your Stoic muscles. As Seneca notes, “That which has been long expected is more gentle when it arrives.”13 Also, we should expect adversity to occasionally cross our paths because “hardships arrive through a law of nature.”14 The premeditation of adversity goes back to the earliest Greek Stoics and was used by all of the significant Roman Stoics.15 Seneca refers to it often across his many writings. One of the most famous places it crops up is at the beginning of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Writing a note in his personal journal, Marcus reminds himself: “Say to yourself each morning: Today I will meet with people who are meddling, ungrateful, overbearing, deceitful, envious, and unsocial. They suffer from these flaws through ignorance of good and bad.”16

True enough: Seneca and the other Stoics realized that the world is full of annoying people. And since they will cross your path, you might as well anticipate it. That will help you to avoid having a negative, emotional reaction when it actually takes place. So the next time you go for a drive in your car, remind yourself that you might encounter a crazy motorist, fueled with road rage. Should that happen, you won’t feel surprised in the least, but like a well-trained Stoic, you’ll be able to say, “I knew it” or “I expected it.”17

My best use of praemeditatio malorum involved my little son, Benjamin. Shortly after he was born, I bought a townhouse in Sarajevo. While it has a beautiful view, the hard wooden stairs leading up to the third floor, where the bedrooms are located, are extremely steep and dangerous. As we’d say in the United States, “They aren’t up to code.” The stairs are so hazardous that if Benjamin had fallen down them, he literally could have been killed.

To prevent my son from hurting or even killing himself, I approached the project in stages. First, I took every reasonable precaution I possibly could to prevent this from happening. After I purchased the house, I had a railing installed on the stairway to make the stairs safer for everyone. (It was unbelievable that there was no railing installed, to begin with!) Second, I had a wooden gate made with a lock on it and installed at the top of the stairs. We would lock the gate at night so that no one could tumble down the stairway by accident. Finally, I placed friction tape on the narrow, slippery stairs, to create some traction and make them less dangerous.

That was everything I could physically do, but the stairway remained unsafe. So the next step involved training. Every morning, when Benjamin walked down the stairs with his mom to go to school, I would always say, “Benjamin, be sure to hang on to the railing!” He would say, “Okay!” and proceed accordingly. In fact, I still remind him today.

The last thing I did was to practice praemeditatio malorum. Since this was a serious concern, I would imagine Benjamin falling down the stairs and hurting himself. That way, if it actually happened, at least I’d be fully prepared for it. (In other words, I wouldn’t panic the way my wife did when our son fell off a slide at kindergarten and hit his head.) I also imagined how I would respond to him falling down the stairs, based on the severity of his injuries.

While this sounds like a slightly unpleasant exercise, I’m glad I did it, because, sure enough, one day he did fall down the stairs, when he was six. Fortunately, he was toward the bottom of the stairs when he fell. And while he scraped his back on the hard, sharp edges of the stairs, he was fine. It was just a scare with no severe injuries. The Stoic training I had used allowed me to respond to the misfortune calmly—with concern, but without panic. There was no sense of shock or surprise when it happened, because I had anticipated it.

The Stoic exercise of contemplating future misfortune strongly resembles a technique of modern psychotherapy known as exposure therapy, which helps people confront and overcome their fears. In exposure therapy, the patient is exposed bit by bit to the source of the anxiety or phobia, but in tiny doses. Over time, the exposure increases until the fear completely vanishes or is significantly diminished. While exposure therapy can take many different forms, one technique involves exposing yourself to the source of the fear entirely through the imagination. That kind of exposure therapy, which is used today by psychologists, corresponds exactly to the ancient Stoic practice.

As William B. Irvine points out in his recent book, The Stoic Challenge, another unexpected benefit of practicing the premeditation of adversity is that it helps someone overcome hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation happens when you buy a shiny new object that delights you, but over time you adapt to it and the pleasure of owning it wears off. You might even take it for granted. Seneca, being the keen psychologist he was, described this common experience several times in his writings: “Don’t you see,” he asked, “that everything loses its force once it becomes familiar?”18

Having lived in my house for over five years now, I’m not nearly as excited about the place today as when I first bought it. But if I practice the premeditation of adversity and imagine it being destroyed by a fire or by an earthquake, it makes me once again feel grateful for something I might otherwise take for granted. Similarly, the Stoics recommend that we regularly remind ourselves that our closest family members and friends will one day die, perhaps even tomorrow. Not only is this a fact of nature, but reflecting on it will also help us reduce the emotional shock when they do leave us. But in a positive sense, it encourages us not to take them for granted in the present moment, and to be grateful each day for the time we still have together.

TESTED BY THE UNIVERSE: ADVERSITY AS TRAINING

While Seneca believed that nothing terrible could happen to the inner character of a wise person (see chapter 10), it’s a law of nature that everyone will experience adversities. In the Stoic view, however, these adversities are sent to us by “God” or “the universe” as “training exercises,” to test us and help us develop our character. (While Seneca uses the term God like other Stoics, it’s essential to know that the Stoic idea doesn’t correspond to the Christian concept of God. The Stoic notion refers to a kind of intelligence present in nature, which they would call God, Nature, Fate, Zeus, the universe, and many other terms interchangeably. In this book, I use the term “the universe,” when possible, to avoid any confusion with the Judeo-Christian idea of God.)

Seneca wrote that while “fire tests gold, adversity tests brave men.”19 Significantly, he wrote an entire work, On Providence, about how the universe sends us “tests” so we can develop better characters. As Seneca quoted his old friend Demetrius as saying, “No one seems more unhappy to me than someone who has never faced adversity.” The reason why, Seneca explains, is because “such a person has never been able to test himself.”20

In fact, Seneca emphasizes that a person can never be sure of his strength of character until it is tested: “To have nothing that inspires you, to have nothing that challenges you to take action, to have nothing to test the strength of your mind against—that is not the peace offered by tranquility. It is merely floating becalmed, on top of a dead sea.”21 As he writes elsewhere, the universe is like a father who gives his children a bit of tough love. Only by being stirred up by labors, pains, and losses can we become genuinely robust as human beings. Conversely, “Unimpaired good fortune cannot withstand a single blow.”22

For Seneca, one of the worst things that could happen to anyone would be to lead a life of extreme pleasure and ease, without having one’s character tested. After Seneca, Epictetus used almost identical language. “It is difficulties that reveal a person’s character,” he wrote. So whenever someone faces adversity, it’s like a gymnastic trainer has “matched you against a powerful, young opponent.” When someone asked Epictetus why this takes place, he replied, “So that you might become an Olympic champion; and that’s something that can never be achieved without some sweat.”23

TRANSFORMING ADVERSITY

No matter what Fortune sends his way, the wise person will transform it into something admirable.

—Seneca, Letters 85.40

One of the most inspiring things about Roman Stoicism is how the Stoics believed something good can always come out of an adverse situation. As Seneca wrote, “Disaster is virtue’s opportunity.”24 Even the worst misfortune allows us to respond in a virtuous way.

As Seneca explained, regardless of what happens, we must find the good in it, and transform the situation to good. In this way, “It’s not what you face, but how you face it that matters.”25

In the real world, our lives are full of failure. Sometimes, whether in business or love, our best-laid plans just don’t work out. Within the first ten years, most small businesses go under. Marriages fail. People lose their jobs, often through no fault of their own. The important thing for a Stoic is to understand that it’s just a fact of nature that our plans or objectives will sometimes fail. And when those failures occur, it’s our responsibility to learn from them, respond to them with virtue, or turn failure into some other kind of opportunity.

For example, for many years, I ran a small book publishing company that was barely profitable most years. But the skills I learned from running that company allowed me to start an editorial and book design company, which has allowed me to work for some of the most highly regarded publishers in the world. It also allowed me to research and write this book.

Seneca said that a wise Stoic resembles a skilled animal trainer, like a lion tamer. In its natural state, a lion might be fierce, dangerous, and terrifying. But under the influence of a good trainer, a ferocious lion can become a gentle companion, even allowing the trainer to kiss the lion, hug it, and slide his arm between the lion’s deadly jaws. For Seneca, the way a Stoic tames adversity exactly resembles the work of the animal handler: “Similarly, the wise person is a skilled expert at taming misfortune. Pain, poverty, disgrace, imprisonment, and exile are feared by everyone. But when they encounter the wise person, they are tamed.”26

No one is in control of the circumstances we are given in life, but the Stoic takes whatever situation is at hand and makes use of it, transforming it into something valuable. “Whatever might happen,” wrote Epictetus, “it’s within my power to derive some benefit from it.”27

In this way, the Stoic aims to make good use of whatever life, or the present moment, happens to offer. As Marcus Aurelius explains, if something negative happens to us, we can “use the setback to employ another virtue.”28 Or as Seneca writes, whatever is bad, the Stoic “turns into good.”29

Ryan Holiday took this Stoic idea from the writings of Marcus Aurelius and transformed it into the memorable title of his book, The Obstacle Is the Way (2014). Marcus Aurelius inspired that title, almost twenty centuries later, with this reminder to himself, which he wrote in his Stoic notebook:

Our actions may be impeded . . . but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.

The impediment to action advances action.

What stands in the way becomes the way.30

As we can see from these passages, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—the major Roman Stoics—were in full agreement about the value of transforming adversity into something better. More importantly, as they show, no matter what might happen to us, we can always respond in a way that brings goodness into the world.

*​For Seneca, Fortune was akin to being a cosmic power, so I often capitalize it in this book, along with other Stoic terms that refer to cosmic powers such as Nature, Fate, and Logos (reason or rationality).