Seneca Letter 18 – The Merits of Voluntary Discomfort
Seneca Letter 18 to Lucullus details the importance of the powerful Stoic practice ‘Voluntary discomfort’.
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’”
— Seneca
Seneca shares the ‘teachings of great men’ with Lucullus as a means of strengthening his mind.
He suggests consciously creating situations of stress through fasting, living from the bare necessities and refraining from pleasures.
Why would anyone do such a thing?
To prepare for contingencies.
“It is while Fortune is kind that it [the soul] should fortify itself against her violence.”
Seneca explains how soldiers practice their moves when there are no enemies.
They strengthen themselves in times of peace so that nothing surprises them on the battlefield.
We, too, should do this throughout the different areas of life.
Fortune, which sometimes works with ‘Old Man Murphy’ (Murphy’s Law), loves to change circumstances.
Many high performers have experienced this firsthand.
Your prospering business, which has served you well for decades, goes bankrupt in a year from an unforeseen change in economic conditions.
You have trained for many years to compete at the World Cup only to suffer a catastrophic, career-ending injury.
Life comes with many twists and turns which catch the uninitiated by surprise.
“If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes… in their imitation of poverty… they might never recoil from what they had so often rehearsed.”
Only practice can prepare you.
Seneca Letter 18 Advice: How Long Should you practice voluntary discomfort?
“Let the pallet be a real one, and the coarse cloak; let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby.”
The prescription of 3-4 day stretches is given.
The practice is not meant to be one of self-torture, but one which reveals hidden layers of inner strength.
The practice ceases to have any benefit when it becomes a mere ‘hobby’.
If you enjoy going to the gym 6 times a week, you are not practicing voluntary discomfort.
However, if you switch your usual weightlifting training for hiking or some other foreign exercise, you will reap benefits.
The idea is to switch the means of voluntary discomfort whenever you become accustomed to the stress.
This will happen often.
You will quickly learn the human soul is incredibly adaptable.
What previously bothered you will no longer disturb your spirit.
You will ask yourself, “Is this the condition I feared”, over and over again.
Voluntary Discomfort for building an Abundance Mindset
One of the areas in which Seneca insists we practice voluntary discomfort is the realm of money.
He shares the story of Epicurus, who at times would practice a form of voluntary discomfort living on a penny a day.
Epicurus’ reasons for voluntary discomfort were different to that of the Stoics.
“…he wished to see whether he thereby fell short of full and complete happiness, and, if so, by what amount he fell short, and whether this amount was worth purchasing at the price of great effort.”
Being an Epicurean he simply wanted to see how much pleasure he could derive from the necessities.
The Stoic approach seeks to help you gain freedom from dependence on material things.
Material things such as money were not scorned by Stoics, but seen as ‘Preferred Indifferents’ – things which are nice to have but not needed to live the good life.
The love of money becomes bad when it obstructs you from being able to extract the joy from life.
When money clouds your judgement leading you to vice, omits your gratitude and lowers your energy, then it becomes a problem.
Interestingly enough having too much of a fixation on losing money tends to push money away.
Focusing on scarcity creates more scarcity.
The solution is to remove the importance associated with money by understanding you can live without it.
“For he alone is in kinship with God who has scorned wealth. Of course I do not forbid you to possess it, but I would have you reach the point at which you possess it dauntlessly…”
There comes a great pleasure in knowing you can survive on the bare necessities.
The power comes to you when you can appreciate the good in what most would consider unsatisfactory.
“For though water, barley-meal, and crusts of barley-bread, are not a cheerful diet, yet it is the highest kind of Pleasure to be able to derive pleasure from this sort of food, and to have reduced one’s needs to that modicum which no unfairness of Fortune can snatch away.”
This removes the fear of failure which stops many people from achieving their goals.
You will take more risks and commit to your plans because failure won’t exist in your mind.
How can you fail when you are able to thrive at the bottom?
In a conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Musk revealed he lived on a $1 a day diet when he first arrived in the US.
“So I was like, ‘Oh, okay. If I can live for a dollar a day — at least from a food cost standpoint — it’s pretty easy to earn $30 dollars in a month, so I’ll probably be ok.’”
— Elon Musk
Musk did this experiment as a teenager to see if he could live off the bare necessities.
For a month he ate mostly ‘hotdogs and oranges…pasta green peppers and a big thing of sauce’, which provided the sustenance he needed.
Musk believes the experiment helped him from a psychological perspective to pursue his grand ambitions.
Seneca Letter 18 on Anger
The parting advice in Seneca Letter 18 deals with the destructive power of anger.
Seneca, who wrote extensively about anger, once again warns us about its dangers.
He explains how a person overcome by anger is no different from a madman.
“…it makes no difference how important the provocation may be, but into what kind of soul it penetrates.”
Those who don’t deal with their anger are subject to provocation from the smallest things.
The destructive power of the anger, however, can be extreme despite the degree of provocation.
Seneca compare anger to the fire.
“It does not matter how great is the flame, but what it falls upon.”
Wet timbers can stop a fire, while dry timbers can be ignited by the smallest flame.
What matters is not the flame (provocation) but the timber (soul) of the person.
A person who works on themselves will be immune to the damaging power of anger.
Do this, and I promise you will be one step closer to living and dying well.