This third letter to Lucilius is all about friendship. Seneca talked about choosing our friends carefully. Once we have decided who we should be friends with we have to put all trust to them as we put trust in ourselves. “Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and…
The central theme of this second letter is productivity. Seneca advises Lucilius that the key to getting the most of something whether be it reading a book, learning from different mentors, finishing a task, or traveling is to focus on one book, mentor, task, or place. He stressed out that the ability to focus on one thing or stay in one place is an indication of organized thinking. “The primary indication,…
In this first letter, Seneca stressed out the importance of valuing time. To make a point he said that time is the only commodity we own. “Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” Seneca describes how we waste our time and how we can make use of it to the fullest. As for the former, he said that we waste our time if we do bad things (vices), do nothing, or…
If you have been exposed to Stoicism, you probably have known that one of the ways we can attain inner peace is to divide things into which we have control and that which we don’t have control. Things in our control include our thoughts, emotion, and behavior and things not in our control include our reputation, other people’s opinions, weather, death, and general life circumstances. This is popularly known as…
One of the things that the stoics talk frequently in their works is the idea of death. It’s probably, for most of us weird, to even talk about it but the stoics had a clever way of putting death into perspective to deal with the difficulties of life, especially anxiety. Here are 5 ways the ancient stoics view death:Death is a natural process.“And what dying is—and that if you…