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

CHAPTER 8

The Battle Against Fortune: How to Survive Poverty and Extreme Wealth

The poor person is not someone who has too little, but someone who always craves more.

—Seneca, Letters 2.6

RIDING FORTUNE’S ROLLER COASTER

Everyone has some interest in money. And why not? We all have bills to pay. But how much money is too little? How much is excessive? Everyone will have his or her own views about this, but Seneca’s are especially interesting. He was one of the wealthiest people during his time, yet he was keenly aware of the psychological and moral dangers involved in the pursuit of financial success. He also experienced losing half his wealth, practically overnight. On Fortune’s roller coaster, what goes up often comes down.

Fortuna was a Roman goddess, and, as noted, sometimes I uppercase the term Fortune since, for Seneca, it verged on being a cosmic power, like Fate. The Stoic problem with Fortune, whether good or bad, is that it’s not up to us or fully within our control. As Seneca pointed out, what Fortune gives you is not truly your own. It can be taken away. By contrast, that which is truly good—a well-developed character—comes from within and is ours to keep.

Seneca writes extensively about Fortune, leaving no doubt that it was his biggest enemy. “The high places,” he said, “are the ones struck by lightning.”1 He explains that people who suddenly become wealthy often lose their psychological balance. They “imagine that their good luck will never end and that their gains will not just continue but increase. Having forgotten this trampoline on which human affairs bounce up and down, they feel certain that chance will remain steady for them alone.”2

As we know, the world is full of stories about lottery winners who have lost all of their winnings. When someone obtains great wealth quickly, that doesn’t mean he or she has the skill, or mental equilibrium, to manage it. Back in the dot-com bubble days of the late 1990s, I knew an amateur stock trader who turned fifty thousand dollars into over a million in a very short period, and then lost it all. She was afraid of selling her stocks and then having to pay taxes on the profits. By that refusal to sell, she lost everything when the bubble collapsed. Similarly, there are many public stories of celebrities who have lost vast sums through high living, extravagance, and lack of moderation. As one of many possible examples, when he died Michael Jackson was between four hundred and five hundred million dollars in debt.3

In the Middle Ages, the Wheel of Fortune was a famous allegory of wealth’s unpredictability (see figure 5). In these illustrations, Fortune or Chance, often wearing a blindfold, rotates a wheel resembling a small Ferris wheel. The wheel lifts those stricken by poverty up from the bottom to the extreme wealth of kings, but it simultaneously drags the wealthy, at the top, back down to the level of beggars. As Seneca wrote, “Every rank in life is subject to change, and whatever befalls someone else could befall you too.”4 Also, since things swing back and forth, no one should be overly confident when things go well, or give up when things go poorly.5

Fig 5: The Wheel of Fortune. Lady Fortune’s wheel lifts those stricken with poverty up to the wealth of kings and drags the wealthy down into poverty.

Seneca himself was no stranger to the wild swings of Fortune. As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, he skyrocketed to wealth and fame as a Roman senator early in his career, only to be exiled to the island of Corsica for eight years by the Emperor Claudius. This involved Seneca losing half of his wealth and being separated from his wife, right after losing their only child. Then, after finally returning to Rome, Seneca achieved even greater fortune as adviser to the Emperor Nero.

Shortly after being exiled to Corsica and losing so much, Seneca wrote this message to his mother, Helvia, reflecting on his experience:

I have never trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace. All those blessings that she generously bestowed on me—money, position, and influence—I stored in a place from which she could reclaim them without disturbing me. I have maintained a great distance between those things and myself; and so she has taken them away, but not torn them away, from me. No one has been crushed by Fortune unless he was first deceived by her gifts.6

BEFORE MONEY RULED THE WORLD, EVERYTHING WAS FREE

In Letter 90, Seneca tells a story about how people lived simply and more freely in earlier times, before complex civilization emerged. Seneca’s story revolves around the idea of natural wealth: nature freely provides what its creatures require. For example, everything that an animal requires to survive in its natural habitat is readily available and requires little effort to obtain.

The same holds true, Seneca claims, for the earliest people. “Nature imposed no painful demands on us,” he writes. “Nothing needed for life was difficult to obtain. Everything was prepared for us at our birth.” He continues:

It is we who made things difficult for ourselves through contempt for what was easy. Housing, shelter, clothing, and food—things that have now become a huge business—were ready at hand, free, and easily available. Everything then was based on actual need. It is we who made all of these things expensive and objects of envy. It is we who made everything difficult to obtain through many and great technical skills.7

The idea that “nature’s needs are few” runs throughout all of Seneca’s works. It’s we who make things much more difficult than they need to be. While the lives of the earliest people would have been rustic, they lived safely and freely beneath their thatched roofs. But those who live under marble and gold roofs live in a state of servitude. Commenting on the wealthy Romans of his time, Seneca notes, “The natural measure that limited our desires to actual needs, within our means, has now vanished. These days, if someone wants only what is enough, they are seen as being uncultured and poverty-stricken.”8

In the end, it was human greed that introduced poverty. By desiring more than was needed, we lost everything. In the earliest times, according to Seneca’s story, people cared for one another equally. But then people who were more powerful and greedy “came to lay their hands upon the weaker.” They would “hide away things for their own use” and “started to shut out others from the necessities of life.”9 Then, as things developed even further, people became blinded by the idea of wealth and seduced by the desire to display their wealth to others in extravagant ways. This is what we would now call the idea of “fame and fortune,” and as Seneca writes, “All such prosperity just wants to be noticed.”10

Rather than favoring the fame-and-fortune approach, which causes human suffering, Seneca advocated a path of voluntary simplicity. As he wrote to Lucilius, “You should measure all things by your natural needs, which can be satisfied for free or at very little cost. . . . Nature desires nothing beyond some food.”11

THE DANGERS OF EXTREME WEALTH

Anyone who has surrendered to the power of Fortune has set himself up for great and inescapable mental turmoil.

—Seneca, Letters 74.6

For Seneca, the dangers of extreme wealth are many. Epicurus, the founder of a rival school to the Stoics, wrote that “for many people, the acquisition of riches has not been the end of their troubles, but merely a change in their troubles.”12 While Seneca disagreed with many teachings of Epicurus, this was not one of them.

As the business writer Timothy Ferriss and others have noted, when people become suddenly wealthy, it amplifies their existing character traits. Some mentally stable people, like Warren Buffett—worth about $83 billion as of this writing—are not fazed by great wealth at all. He still lives in a house that he bought for $31,500 in 1958. He also frequently eats cheap fast food—think McDonald’s—and drives an inexpensive car. These facts suggest that his lifestyle is quite staid and that he’s not attracted to extravagant living. But for other people, when they become wealthy, it increases their sense of self-importance and amplifies their negative character traits, which Seneca cataloged in detail. As he notes, extreme wealth makes many people unstable, but it affects people differently: “Prosperity is a restless condition; it torments itself. It unsettles the brain, in more ways than one, because it affects people differently. Some people it provokes toward power, others toward self-indulgence. Some it puffs up; others it softens, and totally incapacitates them.”13

While Seneca’s Latin can be translated as “puffs up” or “inflates,” we today would refer to this condition as psychological inflation. Elsewhere he writes, great wealth “inflates the mind, breeds arrogance, attracts envy, and disturbs reason” to such a degree that people love to have a reputation for affluence, even though that reputation is likely to harm us.14

One of the greatest dangers of extreme wealth is that it encourages some people to become addicted to luxury, excess, and living beyond their means. In other words, the virtue of moderation gets thrown out the window. In the worst situation, what were once luxuries become necessities. Offering a case study of out-of-control excess, Seneca tells the story of the Roman lover of luxury, Apicius, who would spend any amount needed to procure the world’s finest food. After he spent one hundred million Roman sesterces (an astronomically huge amount of money) on his addiction to fine dining, he discovered that he had “only” ten million left. Afraid that he might die in “poverty” and without his extravagant meals, Apicius killed himself instead.15

Another problem associated with extreme wealth is the challenge of maintaining it. Wealthy people, like the rest of us, often live beyond their means. But Fortune is fickle. Once you acquire an expensive piece of property, or two, or three, you need to maintain it all. This requires a large, continuing flow of income. “Preserving great wealth is an anxious task,” Seneca wrote, and “great prosperity is great slavery.”16 To maintain great wealth requires new wealth, and the greater one’s fortune rises, the more likely it is to collapse, which is a source of worry and misery for anyone who lives beyond his or her means.

As the modern Stoic philosopher William B. Irvine points out, fame and fortune go together because they are both signs of social status. Even if we can’t achieve fame and fortune on a massive scale, almost everyone seeks social status: “If universal fame eludes them, they seek regional fame, local renown, popularity within their social circle, or distinction among colleagues. Likewise, if they can’t amass a fortune in absolute terms, they seek relative affluence: they want to be materially better off than their co-workers, neighbors, and friends.”17

Some things never change, and as Seneca pointed out two thousand years ago, the pursuit of social status leads to envy, greed, and ambition. “Regardless of how much you own,” he notes, “if someone else has more, you will feel your wealth to be insufficient by the same amount in which you fall short of another. Your madness for success be so great that, if anyone is ahead of you, it will seem that no one is behind you.”18 Wealth can inspire greed because the more money you have, the more you can make.

Finally, another source of misery generated by wealth is the pain of loss. Seneca suggests that “we should keep in mind how much less the pain is from not having wealth than losing it. Then we will realize that, since poverty has less to lose, it is less likely to torment us.”19

OVERCOMING FINANCIAL WORRY: “PRACTICING POVERTY” AND VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY

If you wish to have free time for your mind, you should either be poor or resemble the poor. Study cannot be helpful without a concern for simple living, and simple living is voluntary poverty.

—Seneca, Letters 17.5

If you’ve ever been worried about money, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey conducted by H&R Block, 59 percent of all Americans “constantly worry about money to some degree.”20 As Seneca emphasized, even the most wealthy people worry about money, which still holds true. According to Jeremy Kisner, a certified financial planner, “A recent survey revealed that 48% of millionaires, and 20% of ultra-high net worth households ($5–$25 million), were still worried about running out of money in retirement.” If you read his short article, “Why Rich People Worry about Money,” you’ll see that little has changed from Seneca’s time, including the reasons for worry.21

As I suggested in chapter 3, it’s entirely valid to have financial concerns, but worry is probably not the best term to use. By simply eliminating the term “worry” from my vocabulary and replacing it with “concern,” I’ve become more emotionally resilient, because worry is a negative emotion. By contrast, a concern is something to be addressed with reason. While this might seem like a very small change, the results have been noticeable.

That aside, judging by Seneca’s letters, his friend Lucilius chronically worried about financial matters, even though he must have been wealthy. Lucilius was always fretting, wondering about how he could retire and lead a more leisurely lifestyle. And as you might imagine, Seneca had plenty of advice to offer him. Like the multimillionaires who worry about running out of money today, Seneca pointed out that Lucilius’s worries were primarily psychological.

Many people today have fully valid financial concerns when it comes to retirement. Still, it’s hard to believe that this also applied to Seneca’s wealthy friend Lucilius, who seemed to be an expert at making excuses. To address this issue, Seneca spent several letters trying to deconstruct his friend’s beliefs about how much money he really needed, along with his view that “poverty” was something terrible. While Seneca used the term “voluntary poverty” to describe a good lifestyle, we today would translate this as voluntary simplicity. For Seneca, the person who has enough is truly rich, and the fastest way to become rich is to give up on the endless pursuit of wealth.

Seneca urged Lucilius not to postpone living now, and suggested that he should scale back his well-paying but unfulfilling lifestyle:

You have sunk into a kind of life that will never bring an end to your miseries and servitude. . . . If you retire from your public position, everything you have will be less, but life will be more fulfilling. As things stand, you have many piles of things heaped up all around, but they don’t satisfy you. So which do you prefer: abundance in the midst of scarcity or scarcity in the midst of abundance? Prosperity is not just greedy—it is exposed to the greed of strangers. As long as nothing is enough for you, you will not be enough for others.22

As he stresses throughout the letters, only a wise person is satisfied by what he has, and common things, like simple foods, can deliver great pleasure. If you instantly want to become rich, Seneca suggests, stop thinking about adding to your money, but instead subtract from your desires.

Seneca then gives Lucilius a project of “practicing poverty” to see how little he can get by on. In what is now a famous passage, popularized by Tim Ferriss, he writes: “Set aside a certain number of days, during which you will be satisfied with the least amount of food, of the cheapest kind, and with rough and shabby clothing. Then say to yourself: “Is this what I was fearing?”23

This, of course, is a kind of “exposure therapy” and training for future adversity. Seneca tells Lucilius,

Endure this for three or four days, sometimes more, so that it’s not a game but really a test. Believe me, then, Lucilius: You will feel astonished to be well-fed for just a few cents; and you will realize that your peace of mind does not depend on Fortune. For even when angry, Fortune provides enough for our needs.24

Lucilius, he says, should “start to do business with poverty,” as a way to find contentment by easing his financial concerns.

According to Tim Ferriss, his friend Kevin Kelly, the author and cofounder of Wired magazine, performs an identical practice to the one described by Seneca. He occasionally camps out in his living room for a few days in a sleeping bag and eats only instant oatmeal and instant coffee. This reminds him that he can survive any situation. Kelly traveled the world with a backpack in his twenties, with next to nothing in cash, and seems to have taught himself the practice of voluntary simplicity without any help from Seneca.

One way that I’ve experimented with Seneca’s technique is by creating inexpensive but delicious hot breakfasts at home, starting with two hardboiled eggs, heated pinto beans, and salsa. The gourmet version includes some avocado slices with lemon juice and a bit of tunafish. Sometimes I’ll include a few sun-dried tomatoes. Periodically, I calculate the per-breakfast cost for each variation. At today’s prices, the least expensive breakfast comes out to $1.50, using canned beans. One of my favorite healthy and hot lunches costs $2.50: a reheated turkey burger with a bit of kalamata olive paste on top, served with hot beans and salsa on the side. While I often spend more on food by going out, it’s psychologically reassuring to know that I could eat quite well, if needed, for $6 a day or less than $200 a month. Of course, if I went the rice-and-beans route, it would be even less.

For anyone who has financial concerns, it’s often a helpful exercise to calculate the least amount of money you could live on, and then experiment with following that lifestyle, at least in part.

A life of voluntary simplicity, as advocated by the Stoics, also allows you greater personal freedom to pursue your own interests. Because a simple lifestyle reduces your expenses, it could reduce the time you need to work, resulting in more free time.25 As Seneca wrote, “Only a small amount will satisfy nature’s needs. She is content with just a little. It’s not our hunger that costs us dearly, but our ambition.”26 He also noted, writing to his mother, that “A person who lives within the bounds set by nature will never feel poor; but someone who exceeds those bounds will be chased by poverty even amidst the greatest wealth.”27 For Seneca, “The worst kind of poverty is those who feel poor in the midst of their riches.”28

USING FORTUNE’S GIFTS

Virtue does not come from wealth, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for humans.

—Socrates, Plato’s Apology 30A–B

While Seneca saw how distracting and damaging extreme wealth could be to people with an unsteady character, the Stoics saw wealth, overall, to be an advantage: it’s something you should desire, they said, along with good health, if possible, even if wealth and health won’t improve your character.

Because Seneca was an advocate of simple living, yet extremely wealthy himself, he was accused of hypocrisy during his lifetime.29 At the end of his little book On the Happy Life, Seneca takes aim at his critics, arguing against them. But his entire thinking about this can be summed up in one simple thought: It’s fine to use the gifts of fortune, as long as you’re not enslaved to them.

As Seneca told Lucilius, no one can truly be happy until they’ve risen above wealth. Consequently, those who possess wealth must convince themselves that they would be happy without it. They should view wealth as something that could disappear at any moment.30 In other words, if you possess wealth or any gift of fortune, you shouldn’t become attached to it.

Seneca’s most compelling argument for the value of wealth is that a wealthy person can use his financial resources to practice virtue. In other words, people with wealth can use it wisely to benefit others and society.

When I lived in the United States, my next-door neighbor Fred was just such a person. Fred and his daughters own an engineering company that was doing $220 million in sales at the time. While he was wealthy, he was also down-to-earth, easy to talk with, and never once showed the least bit of arrogance or extravagance. In fact, despite being successful in business, Fred’s main interest in life was helping other people and trying to improve society. His family’s foundation had given millions to the local community. But one program he created, and was understandably proud of, trained thirty people with the skills they needed to get off welfare. When they completed the training, he gave them all permanent jobs—a feat the government had been unable to accomplish.

One day I was over at his house, which had a beautiful view of the countryside but an unassuming, rustic-style interior. As we sat there sipping coffee, he confided to me, “I love working on these projects to make things better. The most interesting problem, which I think about often, is how to eliminate poverty.”

Once, when I experienced a personal tragedy, Fred walked over to my house to see how I was doing. When we talked, he said, “When something like that happens, I think you can only put it in God’s hands.” While Fred was a Christian, those words have a very Stoic ring to them. For as the Stoics said repeatedly, “Some things are not up to us.”

In any case, Fred is a perfect example of what Seneca had in mind when saying that if you possess wealth, you have a fabulous opportunity to practice virtue.

When Seneca addressed his critics, who accused him of hypocrisy for being wealthy, he delivered a perfect, stinging response, which makes me feel a sense of delight whenever I read it. “If my wealth flows away,” he wrote, “it will only take itself. But if you lose your wealth, you will be in shock, and you’ll feel as though you’ve lost your very self. For me, wealth has a place, but for you, it holds the highest value. In the end, I own my wealth, but your wealth owns you.”31