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.