Stoicism for a Better Life – Weekly exercise (March 1, 2020)

Hello there,

For this week’s exercise, let us look at an excerpt from the Moral Letters of Seneca to Lucillius XC 14: 

“How, I ask you, can you consistently admire both Diogenes and Daedalus? Which of these two seems a wise man – the one who invented the saw, or the one who, on seeing a boy drink water from the hollow of his hand promptly took his cup from his knapsack and broke it, upbraiding himself with the words, “How foolish I was to carry around superfluous baggage all this time,” and then curled himself up in his barrel and fell asleep?”

This will be a short and simple exercise in theory, but a particularly difficult one to wrap one’s head around given where we live today. Our entire western economy is based on consumerism, and although there are some of us who try and reduce and simplify our purchasing habits, it is too easy to fall into the trap of thinking we need something.

Even as a minimalist of many years, I routinely find myself realizing that I try to reduce the number of “X” I have…before I realize I don’t even need any to begin with. As Seneca puts it above, you might already have just the one cup in your bag, but boy will you feel foolish when you realize you don’t need a cup in the first place.

The point of this exercise, however, is not relegated only to material goods. You may be fighting a battle to…I dunno…reduce the number of hours you play video games. It’s a worthy effort no question about it. But have you ever stopped to consider if you need to have a video console to begin with? And I’m not trying to preach not having fun either. You’ll recall that we all need entertainment and that we can find virtue in the entertainment we choose as well. But Seneca’s challenge to us is this: Can you find something or some way in which you are wasting your precious time pursuing something that is contrary to our nature? Something we do because we’ve always done it that way, or because everyone else does it that way?

So, this week dare to ask yourself the question: “What am I doing contrary to my nature?”. Recall that this may be the pursuit of a good, material, the way in which you spend your time, a paradigm or thought process you have…it could be anything. Virtue is continually striving to hold ourselves to a higher standard when it comes to our judgments and actions. So let’s do that yet another way by identifying one of (I bet many) things we do that is opposed to our nature. Reach out and let me know what it is you identified!

As always, I wish you a wise, tranquil and productive week.

Anderson Silver

(Author of “Your User’s Manual” and “Vol 2: Your Duality Within”)