Welcome to The Stoic Ledger, a daily money meditation from one of the stoic sages.

3/365: Seneca on poverty

Practice poverty.

Fear keeps us in the chair, glued to the screen and tirelessly working to pad the accounts, so we can continue to afford the fine things we’ve grown accustomed to.

Fear of losing them, or the inability to afford them, eats away at our sanity. 

But what if we voluntarily got familiar with that feared state? Only then to ask ourself as Seneca did, “Is this the condition that I feared?” 

When we confront the formless fears held inside, we make them tangible, we give shape to them. This lived experience shows that this once feared state is not the dark place we envisioned. It’s bearable, it’s livable, it’s not all that bad. And perhaps there’s comfort in less. As we acquire and acquire, fill our lives to the brim with things, the possessions begin to consume us.

As Chuck Palahniuk said in Fight Club, “The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.”