II. The Diagnosis: The Restless Mind

Seneca responds. From here to the end of Part II, the voice is Seneca's.

I have been turning this over in silence, trying to find the right comparison for what you are describing.

The closest I can come is this: think of a person who has recovered from a long and serious illness. They are no longer sick. The disease is gone. Still, they keep holding out their wrist to check their own pulse. They feel slightly warm and immediately suspect the fever is returning. They are not unhealthy. They are just not used to being healthy yet.

That is you. The condition you are describing, this state of perpetual mild unease, has a Greek name: euthymia. I translate it as peace of mind, or tranquility. What we are looking for is this: how the mind can move at a steady, unruffled pace, be pleased with itself, look on its own life with satisfaction, and never interrupt that satisfaction, neither surging too high nor sinking too low. That steady, even movement is what tranquility means.

Let me show you how many people share your condition, because it might help to see the range.

There are the fickle ones: they are always fondest of whatever they just gave up. They make a decision, immediately prefer the alternative. Nothing stays good once they have chosen it.

There are the dawdlers: they yawn through life, never committing to anything with enough force to be either satisfied or disappointed.

There are those who find rest only through sheer exhaustion: they toss from position to position, like bad sleepers rearranging themselves in bed, until weariness finally stops them, and then they stay in whatever position exhaustion left them in, not by choice but because they have no energy left to change again.

All of these people are dissatisfied with themselves. The root of it is this: desires that cannot be spoken or fulfilled, hopes that are always suspended, a life lived in a state of suspension.

There are also the restless travelers. They move constantly, certain that somewhere else will fix it. They put it in exactly those terms: Now let's go to Campania for some sun! Now I am sick of soft living, let's find somewhere wild and rugged! Now back to the city, I have missed the noise and the crowds! One journey follows another, one place exchanged for another. Lucretius named the reason perfectly:

Thus every mortal from himself doth flee.

What do you gain by running if you do not escape yourself? You carry yourself with you wherever you go. You cannot run from the heaviest thing you carry, which is your own company.

Understand this clearly: what we suffer from is not the fault of the places. It is the fault of ourselves. We are weak when there is anything to be endured. We cannot bear labor or pleasure, our own affairs or other people's, for very long. The problem follows us everywhere because the problem is us.

Some men have reached such a point of this restlessness that they chose death, not from grief, but from boredom. They had altered their purpose so many times that they were always back at the same place, with nothing new to try. They had become sick of life itself.