Member-only story
The Top 8 Takeaways from “Peace of Mind,” by Seneca
Understand these, and your happiness will NEVER be threatened again
No one who’s never had to overcome any tremendously difficult challenges in their life is qualified to teach you about how to achieve peace of mind.
There’s not a single person on earth who can be said to have had an “easy life” (we all encounter difficulties, suffer losses, get sick, and eventually have to face our own mortality), but Lucius Annaeus Seneca is uniquely qualified to teach us about how to claim tranquility of mind because he’s been through it all.
Seneca is one of the most influential Roman Stoic philosophers, and although he became tremendously wealthy during his lifetime, he was exiled from the Empire twice (once to Egypt as a young man, and then later to Corsica), came up against many of the same kinds of challenges we all face in our lives, and was eventually ordered to commit suicide by the psychopathic dictator, Emperor Nero, whom Seneca tutored from a very young age.
Seneca had to learn early on that the world just isn’t fair: good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes, people who claim to love you will turn their backs on you when it’s convenient for them to do so, great achievements often go unrecognized, and then we die at the end.
