VIII. Property Is the Greatest Source of Human Sorrow

Seneca returns to his familiar theme. What you own often owns you.

Take every other source of human suffering: sickness, loss, fear, hard work, grief. Now compare all of them to the misery that money brings. Money wins. Wealth is the greatest source of unhappiness available to us.

It is less painful never to have had money than to have lost it. A person who has never been rich does not feel the wound of losing wealth. The poor person has less to lose and therefore fewer instruments of torment.

Bion once put it this way: it hurts bald men just as much as hairy men to have their hair pulled. The point is that the pain of loss does not scale with wealth. Rich people do not suffer loss more calmly than poor people. They suffer it the same, or more, because the attachment is deeper.

Diogenes understood this and made himself proof against it. He owned nothing of consequence. When his only slave ran away, someone came to tell him and offered to help get the slave back.

He refused.

He said something like: it would be shameful if Manes can live without Diogenes, but Diogenes cannot live without Manes.

Call this poverty if you want. Call it necessity. He was freer than any rich man alive, because there was nothing Fortune could take from him that he had not already decided he could live without.

The right amount of property is this: enough to keep you from poverty, but not so much that you are far removed from it. Close enough to simplicity that the loss of what you have does not destroy you. Far enough from want that you are not tormented by necessity. That middle ground is the safest place to live.