Seneca, Moral Letters 20.6

"Yes, but I do not know," you say, "how the man you speak of will endure poverty, if he falls into it suddenly." 

 

Nor do I, Epicurus, know whether the poor man you speak of will despise riches, should he suddenly fall into them; accordingly, in the case of both, it is the mind that must be appraised, and we must investigate whether your man is pleased with his poverty, and whether my man is displeased with his riches. 

 

Otherwise, the cot-bed and the rags are slight proof of his good intentions, if it has not been made clear that the person concerned endures these trials not from necessity but from preference. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 20

 

Now the idea may sound good, but how can anyone actually be expected to go through with an indifference to affluence? Once someone gets accustomed to a life of luxury, it will be awfully hard to adapt to a life of austerity. 

 

Will not the reverse, however, also be a challenge? Once someone has only a reference to poverty, the presence of plenty will be quite overwhelming. 

 

I have observed what becomes of people when they experience sudden shifts of fortune, and in almost all cases, with very few exceptions, the pattern has been tragically consistent. I at first saw how the path from riches to rags could be a terrible burden, and yet I then further learned how the path from rags to riches could be equally crippling. In either direction, people were usually knocked down by the transition. 

 

The entitled man suffers when he now loses what he has taken for granted. The struggling man suffers when he now faces the consequences of satisfying his many urges. Folks will fight tooth and nail to become wealthy, and yet they do not grasp how easily it turns into just as much of a curse as being poor. 

 

It doesn’t have to be that way. There is a way out of the dilemma, and it avoids a dependence on fickle circumstances through a fundamental transformation of attitude, where attention is shifted from the state of affairs to a state of mind. 

 

Yes, losing possessions can do harm, and gaining possessions can do harm, but only where an initial judgment has been made, all the way back at the level of founding principles, that life must be measured by externals. 

 

Why was that assumption made? To merely say that everyone else is doing it is not an excuse. How can that assumption possibly be changed? By a critical reflection on what it even means to be human, and a careful deliberation on the reasons why a man’s worth is within the workings of his own soul. If this is rightly understood, then it is within the power of the will to seek out a new set of priorities. 

 

This is why philosophy remains essential to life, for without it we cannot discover our own meaning and purpose. The direction follows from the awareness, such that how we think about our situations is what permits us to master our situations. There is the radical difference between angrily suffering from deprivation and freely choosing to embrace temperance. 

—Reflection written in 9/2012