Philosophy
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
Seneca wrote these as actual letters, to an actual man. Lucilius was a friend, a governor of Sicily, and by the evidence somewhat anxious — and the letters answer him one problem at a time, over years, as the problems came up.
That's why they read less like philosophy and more like correspondence with an unusually clear-eyed older friend. He is not building a system. He is answering your last message.
He was also, throughout, immensely rich, politically compromised, and tutor to Nero — a man who wrote beautifully about the vanity of wealth while holding a great deal of it. He knew this about himself and says so. Bring him your hypocrisy; he has thought about his own.
Start here
His first letter is about this and he never really stops.
He was one of the richest men in Rome and wrote constantly about not needing it.
Most of what we suffer, he argued, we suffer twice — once imagined, once real.
He wrote consolation letters to the bereaved, and faced his own forced suicide.
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Letters from a Stoic is a selection from the 124 surviving Moral Letters to Lucilius, written by the Roman statesman and playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca in the last years of his life, after his withdrawal from Nero's court.
Each letter takes a single practical problem — a noisy apartment above a bathhouse, the death of a friend, the fear of poverty, the temptation of a crowd — and works it until something usable falls out. They are short. Most can be read in five minutes.
Seneca is the most companionable of the Stoics and the least severe. Where Epictetus instructs and Marcus Aurelius interrogates himself, Seneca persuades. He is also the one who wrote most directly about money, status and time, which is why he has outlasted his own reputation.
In its words
Nothing is ours, except time.
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
While we are postponing, life speeds by.
To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
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