3 Things I Learned From Seneca
How do a series of letters from a man who was exiled to an island in the Mediterranean connect with a man who lives with his family in rural Ohio?
I don’t know. But they do.
Seneca was a Roman banker, business man, advisor to the emperor, and philosopher. His writings, some of which are compiled in On The Shortness of Life, focus on the philosophy of stoicism. Here are three things I learned.
1.Life is long. But you have to know how to use it. Time, time, time. I need more time. We lament this so often, it’s lost its meaning. As Louis CK jokes about people who are “starving,” we’re really not. The same is true for time. Seneca writes:
“We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.”
We have enough time, we just don’t use it well. Imagine, Seneca writes, that it’s not time, but property. You wouldn’t think of giving away your car, your shoes, or computer. People guard those things, “but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the on thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
We have enough time, we just need to use it right.
2. The Value of Learning. Seneca says that in learning we can, “annex every age.”
In learning we can collect what’s worked and failed in the past. “By the toil of other we are led into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light” he writes.
When I finished college the first time I thought I was done. I thought that the major phase of learning in life was over and, if anything, my future studies would be a small creep. Not so. I’ve read more in the last four years than in four years of college. One of the things I’ve learned in that time is that I don’t need school to learn.
Sure, I learned things in college, but college is inelastic. Seneca asks, do you wish to have the great lecturers like Zero, Pythagoras, and Aristotle as your friends? Great!
“none of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitors away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day.”
School is sometimes closed. Professors are busy. Lessons are sequential. Learning never is.
3. I Don’t Need Much. When he’s exiled, Seneca writes that he realizes how little a man needs. Food, protection from the cold, a sound mind. That’s all.
And maybe we don’t want much more than that.
Seneca writes about the story of a businessman, who partied away his fortunes down to only 10 million sesterces and he took his own life.
The trouble comes when someone has to go down from where they came. Nassim Taleb writes that it makes a difference how you became a millionaire. To have nothing and become a millionaire means great wealth. To have everything and become a millionaire means great shame.
Simon Schulich too chimed in on this, writing that a law school classmate, who seemed to have everything — family, connections, pedigree, looks, girls, brains — committed suicide a year after graduation. This idea has even been put to music by Simon and Garfunkel.
That Seneca wrote all this two-thousand years ago is remarkable. That it’s still relevant is even more so. If you’d like to see what else I read, subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
