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.