Of course, how someone will find the right balance between work and leisure will vary for each person. The real problem for Seneca is that people become addicted to wealth—or what they believe to be wealth—and this leads to a mindset in which more is always needed. This belief then leads to the hustle and bustle of the preoccupied life. But for Seneca, the person who has enough, even if it is little, is already rich, while those who always seek more are poor. When you have “enough,” you also have time. But people engaged in a constant hustle to acquire more money and status postpone living now and lack the time needed to develop their inner lives.
OVERCOMING SLAVERY: A STOIC PATH TO FREEDOM
Most readers of Seneca will miss an important fact, and I discovered it only recently: Seneca reveals the key to understanding the entire project behind his Letters in the very first line of his very first letter. It’s like a secret message, hidden in plain sight.
While this message would have been evident to readers of the original Latin, it’s not apparent to readers of English translations.
The very first line of Seneca’s letter reads like this in English: “Continue, dear Lucilius, to free yourself: gather and protect your time, which until now was being taken from you, stolen from you, or simply vanished.” But the first part of this line in the Latin more accurately states: “Continue, dear Lucilius, to free yourself for yourself.”
The key phrase here is “free yourself for yourself,” which in the original Latin refers to freeing someone from slavery. In other words, Seneca’s first line of the Letters carries this meaning: “Continue, dear Lucilius—keep freeing yourself from slavery!”
If there was ever any good aspect of slavery in the ancient world, it could only have been that it was possible for a slave to become free. This process was known as manumission. During Seneca’s time, some freedmen or former slaves became extremely successful, wealthy, and high-ranking members of Roman society.
Significantly, three hundred years before Seneca, the earlier Greek Stoics developed the idea that in addition to being enslaved physically, it’s also possible to be enslaved psychologically. In a world where physical slavery was widespread, to speak about inner slavery was an extremely powerful idea, and one that carried an emotional charge. But the idea worked well because Stoic philosophy promised total human freedom on an internal level. Zeno stressed this idea in one of his famous “Stoic paradoxes,” the puzzling sayings the school was famous for. Full of dramatic impact, his cryptic maxim stated, “Only wise people are free, and everyone else is a slave.”10
While this saying was meant to draw attention to Stoic teachings by creating a mental shock in the mind of a reader, similar to an Internet meme today, it implied two separate ideas. The first is that it’s possible to be totally free, externally, but to still be a slave internally. The second is that Stoicism as a philosophy was designed to free its practitioners from the slavery of false judgments and opinions that lead to negative emotions like fear, anxiety, greed, anger, and resentment.11 And that is the exact project of Seneca’s Letters, too, as he reveals in the first line of the very first letter: it’s all about finding true freedom in life.
To give an example, if someone is always angry, snapping out at those around him day after day, that person is psychologically enslaved by negative emotions. But freedom is possible, too. And while the Stoics spoke about “psychological slavery,” we speak today of addiction, which is a related concept.
Elsewhere, Seneca explains, “That’s how it is, dear Lucilius”—while “slavery holds on to a few, many more hold on to slavery.” But if his desire for freedom is genuine, and if he wishes to lay his slavery aside, Seneca promises Lucilius that he’ll discover the freedom he seeks by progressing down the path of Stoic training.12
For people in ancient Greece and Rome, freedom did not mean so much the freedom “to do whatever you like” (or license); it meant the freedom of self-mastery or “freedom from.” It meant self-possession, belonging to yourself, and not being a slave to anything.
This idea that Stoic philosophy was a path leading out of slavery to freedom was even more strongly emphasized by the next great Roman Stoic after Seneca, Epictetus, who was himself, literally, a freed slave. (His name, Epictetus, means “owned” in Greek.)
In his classroom lectures, Epictetus humorously scolded his students, calling them “slaves,” when they were, in fact, the sons of wealthy Roman aristocrats. Like Zeno, Epictetus believed that “only the educated can be free.”13 He also said that a person training to become a Stoic resembles a slave working to become free.14 That graphic description of Stoic philosophy, and its power to free the mind from suffering, is a huge claim to make, and it’s one the Stoics genuinely believed.
Learning how to value and experience the fullness of time, for Seneca, is also a way to overcome another kind of slavery. It’s probably no coincidence that people today, who despise their nine-to-five jobs, often refer to themselves as “wage slaves.” But for modern people who feel imprisoned by time, Seneca offers the ultimate escape route.
LIVING IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME
For Seneca, “It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to live,” but the preoccupied mind of a constant workaholic takes in nothing deeply. By constantly focusing on how to reach higher levels of status or wealth in the future, preoccupied minds can’t fully enjoy the present moment. The greatest obstacle to living fully, Seneca writes, “is expectation, which depends on tomorrow and wastes today.”15
Life is divided into past, present, and future. But since preoccupied people have always been busy, they have little in the way of happy memories from the past. By comparison, people with tranquil minds have many happy memories. Because they weren’t always working, they had more free time to enjoy life deeply, and no one can take those memories away.
After discussing these points, Seneca makes a startling claim:
Of all people, only those who find time for philosophy are really at leisure—they alone really live. For not only do they guard over their own lifetimes, they add every age to their own. All the years that passed before them are added to their own.16
Seneca then explains that the great founders of the philosophical schools in the past gave human beings a way of life to follow and have passed onto us many valuable treasures. But all of these gifts, and even the greatest thinkers of past times, are things (and people) we still have access to, due to the power of the human mind. Thanks to this power, we don’t need to remain trapped in our own era. We can share in the work of past ages, and even debate with past philosophers like Socrates and Seneca, learning from them each day. In this way, we can “turn from this brief and fleeting span of time” and immerse ourselves in a more profound experience of time, “which is boundless, everlasting, and which we share with better minds.”17
Seneca believed that by having access to the philosophical minds of the past, a person will experience a deep sense of happiness until his dying day. In Seneca’s words, “He will have friends with whom he may consider the greatest and smallest matters, whom he may consult with daily about himself, and who will tell the truth without insult, offer praise without flattery, and who will provide a model on which to pattern his own character.”18 As he notes in another writing, “I spend my time with the very best company. No matter where, in which time they lived, I send my thoughts to be with them.”19