Seneca was not excited to be exiled to Corsica, a mountainous and rough-hewn island 60 miles off the coast of Italy, in 41 CE. It was over 190 miles from Rome. It was a rock in the middle of the ocean with a single paved road. It was far from his friends and family. 

Anyone who reads the “consolation” he wrote to his mother during his time there can see that the person he was really consoling was himself. Because he was miserable in this godforsaken place. 

So it catches a student of history off guard to read Napoleon’s descriptions of his bucolic boyhood and beloved homeland… of Corsica. This was a place he was willing to fight and die for. This is the place he wanted to see one last time before he was exiled—the place he wept to think he would never see again.

That’s sort of how things go, isn’t it? It’s what that expression “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” means. But also that one man’s nightmare is another man’s dream. What matters is how we choose to look at things, what matters is the perspective we bring to the situations we face. Seneca could have drank in the beauty that Napoleon did, he could have approached Corsica with more childlike eyes—but instead all he could see was what he lost, all he could do was compare his fate to his life in Rome. In so doing, he deprived himself of what was actually around him and he made his sentence more difficult. 

The question for you today is in, what way are you doing the same thing to yourself? With where you live? Or the job you have? Or the person you married? Or the punishment you’re enduring?

P.S. This was originally sent on October 14, 2020. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.