Look at any millionaire, Seneca tells Lucilius in one of his letters, they are some of the poorest people in Rome. Money has made them obsess over public opinion. Money has control of their schedules and their decisions. Money has put them in the center of a circle of sycophants and grifters. Money has escalated their tastes and expectations beyond quenching.
“These individuals,” Seneca writes, “have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.”
It’s a sad sight, he says.
Sadly, the look-at-any-millionaire experiment still works today—a lot of rich people in this world live very poor lives. They’re rarely not thinking about money. About how to acquire more of it, about what they can trade in their life in exchange for it, about who they know who has more of it than they do. These poor souls know they have a lot of money, but what they don’t understand is that, really, money has a lot of them.
“Money never made a man rich,” Seneca adds, “Do you ask the reason for this? He who possesses more begins to be able to possess still more.” This is a universal human battle. It doesn’t really matter the number in your bank account, it is hard to turn off the brain’s desire for more. Until you can turn it off, until you have a sense for what is enough, you are poorer than the poorest people in Rome.
Saddest of all, these profound insights about the nature of wealth and its grip on individuals came at a time when Seneca himself was under money’s thumb. Money is what attracted him to Nero’s service. In 13 years working for a man who was clearly deranged and evil, Seneca became one of Rome’s richest men. He couldn’t see that Nero was slowly buying him, trapping him in a gilded cage he eventually realized he couldn’t buy his way out of.
This is why Seneca, despite being one of the financially richest Stoics, is our model of “The Poorest Stoic” throughout The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide To Being Rich, Free, and Happy. His is a life full of lessons for what not to do. The kind of opportunities to say no to, the kind of people to steer clear of, the debts (disguised as gifts) to avoid, and much more.
We have built all of these lessons, as well as the Stoics’ best insights on wealth and prosperity, into The Wealthy Stoic! We created this new course that builds upon the best Stoic insights into wealth and money and puts them into a set of achievable, relatable, timeless practices.
