Am I Falling Behind? Stoicism on Money and Status

Very few people lie awake wondering whether they will eat. They lie awake because someone they went to school with just bought a house. Modern money anxiety is mostly positional: not a question about what you have, but about where you are in a queue you did not agree to join and cannot see the end of.

The Stoics were unusually good on this, partly because Roman elite life was a status tournament of exactly the same shape, and partly because the man who wrote most about it was rich enough to be a hypocrite and knew it.

Poverty as a ratio

Seneca's opening move is to redefine the term. Being poor, in his account, is not a quantity of money. It is a relationship between what you have and what you are reaching for:

The consequence is unwelcome: if the gap is what hurts, then income does nothing to close it, because the reference point moves with you. Seneca watched this happen to people all his life, and his practical counter-move is a deliberate change of direction for the eye:

That is a cheaper trick than it looks, and he knows it, so he adds the harder instruction a few lines later:

Note the clause at the end. Not a limit you cannot pass - a limit you would not pass if the way were open. A number that survives a promotion. Most people have never named one, which is why arriving somewhere feels like nothing: he observes in the same letter that these goods look better to those who hope for them than to those who have attained them. And the underlying dependency is stated most plainly in On Leisure:

The obvious objection, made by Seneca first

There is a problem with taking financial advice from Seneca, which is that he was one of the wealthiest men in the Roman Empire - estates, vineyards, a fortune large enough to be a political liability. This is not a modern discovery. His contemporaries said it to his face, and in On the Happy Life he sets out their prosecution at length and in detail rather than ducking it:

It goes on for a paragraph, and it is merciless: why is your furniture smarter than it needs to be, why do you drink wine older than yourself, why does your wife wear the price of a house in her ears, why do you own so many slaves that you cannot recognise them. Then he offers two defences.

The first is a change of plea. He does not claim to be the wise man of Stoic theory; he claims to be a patient describing the cure:

The second is doctrinal, and it is where most readers either accept Stoicism on money or stop. The Stoic claim was never that wealth is bad. It is that wealth is indifferent: not a component of a good life, but perfectly fine to have, in the way a tailwind is fine to have. What matters is which way the ownership runs.

Or, in the version that most exactly describes what he thinks he is doing: he does not love riches, but he prefers to have them; he does not receive them into his spirit, but only into his house.

Does that hold up?

Two honest things can be said. The first is that the position is genuinely available and not a dodge invented for the occasion: the distinction between goods and preferred indifferents is old orthodox Stoicism, and on it a poor sage and a rich sage are equally sages. The second is that it is also precisely what a very rich man would say, and no possible behaviour could falsify it. Seneca sees this too. He points out that his critics were not satisfied by Diogenes the Cynic either, a man who had given up not only possessions but the asking for them:

Fair, and also a way of changing the subject. The reader is entitled to take the argument and discount the arguer.

The rehearsal

The one concrete exercise the Stoics offer here is to test the fear directly. Seneca tells Lucilius to spend a few days a month living on almost nothing - real hard bread, a real thin cloak, not a themed dinner party - and to ask himself while doing it: Is this the condition that I feared? The aim is not asceticism. It is to convert an abstract dread into an experience with a known texture, so that the fear of falling stops being able to bully you.

And then, in the middle of prescribing it, Seneca says the thing that gives the whole exercise its correct weight:

He is aware that voluntary hardship with a return ticket is not hardship, and he says so before anyone else can. That sentence is worth keeping in view whenever Stoicism gets sold as resilience training. The practice is still useful. It is a rehearsal, not a qualification.

What is actually portable

Strip out the villa and the vineyards and three things survive. Poverty is a gap, not a sum, so a raise closes nothing by itself. The queue you are anxious about is one you have consented to stand in, and the only exit is a limit you name yourself while you still have the appetite to exceed it. And the test of whether money owns you is not how much of it you have but what is left of you if it goes. Seneca eventually tried to hand his whole fortune back to Nero and retire; a few years later Nero ordered him to kill himself. He had the opportunity to find out.