What Is Enough
The Teaching
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. … Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough.
— Seneca, Letter 2, trans. R. M. Gummere
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, Letter 18, trans. R. M. Gummere
If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you are kissing, for when the wife or child dies you will not be disturbed.
— Epictetus, Enchiridion 3, trans. George Long
Commentary
Seneca’s second letter gives a definition that has not been improved on. Poverty is not having too little. It is craving more. And the limit of wealth comes in two steps: what is necessary, then what is enough. The second step is the one that requires a person.
Then the Stoics did something unusual. They practised. Seneca tells his friend to set aside days to live as if poor, eating the cheapest food and wearing rough clothes. The point is not to suffer. It is to find that the feared condition is bearable, and to come back to ordinary life able to see it again. Epictetus gives the harder version. When you kiss someone you love, remember they are mortal.
That instruction is usually read as an exercise in not being upset at loss. It works at least as well in the other direction: as an exercise in not losing sight of what is still here. In 2008 four psychologists tested something very close to it. They asked people to imagine good things in their lives never having happened, and found that it lifted their mood more than they predicted. The Stoics had no theory of why. They had found the lever.
Themes
Connections 6
Travelled
Greek thought reached Stoicism by 300 BCE. Stoicism is a Greek school, founded in Athens c. 300 BCE. It took its fire and its Logos from Heraclitus.
Travelled
Stoicism reached Judaism by 50 BCE. Stoic ideas appear in the Wisdom of Solomon (1st c. BCE) and 4 Maccabees, and Philo of Alexandria used the Stoic Logos.
Where This Appears
Sources
en.wikisource.org, *Moral letters to Lucilius*, Letters 2 and 18 (Gummere). gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10661 (Long).