Seneca on Philosophy and Friendship 12

. . . You may say; "What then?  If that man, rich by base means, and that man, lord of many but slave of more, shall call themselves happy, will their own opinion make them happy?"

It matters not what one says, but what one feels; also, not how one feels on one particular day, but how one feels at all times. 

There is no reason, however, why you should fear that this great privilege will fall into unworthy hands; only the wise man is pleased with his own. Folly is ever troubled with weariness of itself. 

Farewell.

—Seneca the Younger, Moral Letters to Lucilius 9, tr Gummere

We have too readily relativized happiness, thinking it is whatever we wish it to be. So we see the vain, the greedy, the deceitful, or the violent insisting that the things they value and the way they live make them perfectly content. If I say I am happy, then surely I am happy.

Now the Stoic can appeal to a universal understanding of the human person, of the order of Nature, or of the moral purpose of our lives to explain why this is sadly mistaken. But the Stoic, however profound his thinking, is committed first and foremost to living. We need only look at the reality of the way people live, day to day. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

As much as I may observe this in others, it is best to judge only myself. Not only may I be prone to deceive both others and myself with false words, I am even more likely to do so when I am in a state of denial. I will protest too much. The worse I feel, the more I may try to tell myself that everything is grand. The words and appearances are irrelevant if they do not reflect the reality.

I may also confuse the feeling of pleasure, which will come and go, with the state of happiness, which is about the way I think and act, and is something constant. As much as I may call something happiness, it is hardly that if it changes with the circumstances.

However much I may mouth the words, or however much I may replace it with an imposter, happiness is never something shallow or fickle. My own experience has always told me that my happiness or my misery are always in direct proportion to my virtue or my vice. My contentment, without exception, is tied to the way I choose to live.

Written 1/2005

Image: Johann Heinrich Lips (1758-1817), An Allegory of Friendship