Some of Seneca’s most vivid writing is inspired by the emptiness of consumer goods:
Suppose you acquire, heaped up, the property of many ultra-rich people. Imagine that fortune carries you far beyond mere private wealth: you get a golden roof, purple clothes, and so much luxury and wealth that you can bury the earth beneath your marble floors. So much that you don’t just possess wealth: you trample on it. Let’s say you also have statues, pictures, any of the most modern and fancy kinds of artwork. All you learn from this is how to desire more stuff.”
(13.8)
Consumerism provides no psychological satisfaction, because there is no limit to our desires for things that we never needed in the first place. Moreover, it is not only pointless, but spiritually damaging. We acquire property that actually robs us of the power to know ourselves and live in accordance with nature, and we believe that losing it will be a real pain—a belief that is pure illusion: “One who owns himself has lost nothing” (42.10). Hunger for food is satisfied by enough food to fill the stomach, but hunger for something we don’t actually need (like nice clothes or big houses or piles of gold) has no natural limit, because there is no natural need that these things satisfy: “Natural desires are limited; but those that spring from false opinion can have no place to stop” (16.9).
Seneca constantly reverts to the theme first taught him by his old tutor Attalus, that “money never makes one rich” (119.9); true wealth comes from being satisfied with enough. “Enough is never too little” (119.7). He insists that we need to remind ourselves that the world is vast, but our actual needs are small and easily satisfied: we do not need crops planted all the way down in Sicily or Africa to fill a single belly; we should measure not only the world, but ourselves, and realize “how little we can consume, and for how short a time” (114.27). Seneca’s Stoicism is the philosophical response to an elite society that has grown increasingly consumerist and materialistic as a result of the vast growth of the Roman empire. “How tiny a part of those banquets of yours, prepared by so many hands, do you taste with your mouth that is already tired by pleasure? … How tiny a part of that shellfish, brought here from so far away, slips down your insatiable throat? Poor things, don’t you know that your hunger is bigger than your stomach?” (89.22). “Prosperity is a restless thing: it troubles itself” (36.1). The only way to escape this bad temptation is retirement to a life of pure contemplation. Seneca insists that riches that may seem to be a lucky gift, that land easily or apparently for free in our laps, always bring a terribly heavy cost: “we would belong to ourselves, if those things were not ours” (42.8). We think these things are cheap, but they are horribly expensive, paid not in money but in far more valuable assets: “a cost of anxiety, of danger, of lost honor, freedom and time” (42.7).
There is a strikingly modern (and quasi-Buddhist) ring to Seneca’s insistence on practicing “voluntary simplicity” or minimalism as a response to the unhealthy psychological pressures of a materialist, consumerist culture.13 Seneca does not appeal to the damage done to natural resources by excessive human production, consumption, and waste. But he does emphasize that our drive for material wealth leads us far away from a life in accordance with nature. Moreover, like many modern advocates for a curb on consumerism, Seneca insists that there is an affinity, not a contrast, between the real needs of humans and the integrity of the natural world. It is good for “nature,” in the sense both of external nature (the external world that is pillaged by excessive consumption) and internal nature (our real needs, to which we may become blind through false kinds of acculturation).
One can see hints in the Letters of Seneca’s attitude toward the world of political power from which he was struggling to disentangle himself. Autonomy is a major theme. Virtue, Seneca stresses, is the only way to achieve real freedom and independence from external control. Virtue is also the only way out from the falsehoods and entrapment of desire and ambition. All our other desires necessarily go unsatisfied: a person in this kind of society (or, rather, Seneca) achieves the height of power and influence and wealth only to want more—more power, more security, more money. However, “the power and greatness of virtue cannot rise to greater heights, because what is already the greatest can’t get bigger” (66.8).
Epistle 73 is important for its extensive discussion of the relationship of philosophers to those in power—a topic that allows Seneca to look back, implicitly, on his own career. Seneca insists that the wise man will always be grateful to those who have helped him along the way and allowed him to put his theories into practice (73.4–5). Philosophy teaches us, above all, to be grateful (73.10). Presumably the epistle is partly designed as a plea to Nero to see Seneca not as an ungrateful former dependent, or as a threat to his own power, but rather as a thankful recipient of the emperor’s favor. But it also continues the task of trying to explain and justify to the emperor his (exalted) reasons for giving up many of his gifts. We must recognize, Seneca insists, that riches are preferable to poverty, but they are not essential and are not part of ourselves, and wealth must be used with moderation: “Few men have been allowed to put aside prosperity gently” (73.18). As so often, Seneca shows his intense awareness that one’s own good fortune can became a trap. Even people, he insists, are not essential to the core of happiness. You can lose your whole family, your spouse, children, friends, everyone you ever knew and loved: and still, if you are virtuous, you can be happy. Virtue “takes hold of the whole soul, and takes away any longing for anything” (73.25).
Seneca insists on the wise man’s imperturbability and lack of anxiety about the future: “What is more crazy than to be anguished by the future, and not save oneself for the real suffering, but invite misery and bring it upon oneself?” (74.33). The sentiment is perfectly sensible, but it seems likely that Seneca would not insist on it so adamantly and so frequently were he himself not constantly troubled by apprehension about his own future. His attitude toward retirement from society—his own and other people’s—remains complex. He suggests that retirement is the best and safest way to retain one’s own integrity, but he also argues that the wise person ought always to be engaged with others wherever he may happen to be. Public life may offer more temptations than a life of simplicity and quasi-solitude: “Who uses gold plate when he dines alone?” (94.70). But the wise person ought ideally to participate and set an example to others of moderation even in the midst of excess. On festival days, for example, Seneca suggests that the hardest but wisest way is not to avoid the crowds of merrymakers but to join in with moderation, setting an example of abstinent behavior even in the midst of excess: “It shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself, and to do the same things as the crowd, but in a different way” (18.4). The resolution to this apparent contradiction can be found in the claim that a life of retirement and a life of social engagement can actually be the same thing. Even in solitude, the philosopher engages with others: “My purpose in hiding myself and locking the door is to help more people” (7.1). The wise man, we learn, “is not apart from the state, even if he retires; no, in fact he has left one tiny little corner, and crosses to bigger, broader realms, and set in the sky, he understands how low the seat he was sitting on was, when he mounted the currule seat [used by senior magistrates] or tribunal chairs” (67.2). As in the Natural Questions, Seneca takes the line that the real engagement with the world that is recommended by Stoicism can best be practiced in what may look, to outsiders, like retirement.