Day 6 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Seneca is the most modern of the Stoics.
Not because his ideas are more sophisticated than Marcus’s or Epictetus’s, they’re not.
Its because his specific failure, trying to live by a philosophy that condemns wealth while being very wealthy, is so recognisably human.
He knew the contradiction.
He wrote about it.
He kept trying anyway.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 4 BC in what is now Spain, educated in Rome, and spent most of his adult life navigating Roman politics, which meant navigating a world of extreme violence, corruption, and sudden reversals of fortune.
He was exiled to Corsica for eight years.
He was tutor to the young Nero and then his closest adviser when Nero became emperor.
He acquired enormous wealth.
He wrote essays and letters about the importance of living simply and not being attached to wealth.
He knew the problem.
“I am not as good as I would be. I am better than I was.” — Seneca
That’s the honest position: not pretending to have arrived, just trying to move in the right direction.
His Letters to Lucilius are the most readable entry point into Stoic thought.
They’re personal, warm, self-deprecating, and precise.
They cover death, time, friendship, anger, grief, reading, and travel, all through the lens of how to live well.
They read like letters from someone genuinely working through these ideas in real time, which is exactly what they are.
The very first letter is about time.
“Secure yourself this time,” he writes, “which up to now has been snatched from you, stolen, or simply lost.”
Not wasted in the sense of laziness, stolen by other people’s demands, lost to distraction, frittered away on things that seemed urgent and weren’t.
He argues that most people arrive at old age realising they haven’t lived, not because life was short, because they spent it on the wrong things.
That letter, written two thousand years ago, describes the experience of scrolling for an hour and feeling slightly worse about yourself.
Seneca understood the mechanism, even if he didn’t have the technology to illustrate it.
For vegans, Seneca’s self-awareness about hypocrisy is a useful companion.
Most vegans know the feeling of knowing your own consistency falls short.
You try to avoid animal products and then discover that the supplement you take, or the glue in your shoes, or the byproduct in your medication, contains something you didn’t account for.
You preach about the environment and then fly somewhere.
You advocate for animal welfare and then get impatient with someone who’s genuinely trying but not as far along as you are.
The Stoic response isn’t to abandon the standard because you can’t reach it perfectly.
It’s to hold the standard honestly, acknowledge the gap, and keep moving in the right direction.
“I am not as good as I would be. I am better than I was.”
Seneca didn’t achieve Stoic perfection.
He said so himself, in writing, which is more honesty than most people manage.
His wealth was a real contradiction.
His closeness to Nero, a man who eventually ordered Seneca’s own death, was a real failure of judgement.
And his letters still carry some of the best writing about how to live that has survived antiquity.
You don’t have to resolve your own contradictions before you’re allowed to hold values.
You just have to keep working on them.
Practice for today
Read Seneca’s Letter 1 (On Saving Time) and Letter 5 (On the Philosopher’s Mean), both available free online.
Then write:
what does Seneca value that you also value?
And where do you genuinely disagree with him?
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.