Name: Why Stoicism Matters
Uploaded: 2020-03-25T02:20:53.000Z
Duration: 7 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and was later dominant in ancient Rome and which continues

to have hugely urgent and important things to teach us

about calm, resilience and emotional stability

Arguably, the greatest and certainly the most

prolific stoic philosopher was the Roman author and statesman

A lot of Seneca's thought is known to us from the letters

he wrote to his friends giving them counsel at times

Seneca had a friend called Lucilius, a civil servant

Lucilius learned of a  lawsuit against him which

threatened end his career and disgrace his good name.

"You may expect that i'm going to advise you to picture

a happy outcome and to rest in the allurements of hope."

"But i'm going to conduct you to peace of mind through another root

which culminated in the advise if you wish to put off

We must always try to picture the worst that could happen

it's to see that we are far more capable of enduring them

To calm Lucilius down, Seneca advised him to himself entirely

at home with the idea of humiliation, poverty

can anything more severe happen to you than being sent into exile

who had himself, survived bankruptcy and eight years

Hope for that which is utterly just and prepare

yourself for that which is utterly unjust.

to maul over in the luxury of his home that he was now

in danger of losing. I'm may become a poor man;

I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself

as born in a place to which I shall be sent.

Behold this clogging burden of a body to which nature

Seneca tells us that we must grow familiar with

not just the sort of events we like to plan for

that are recorded in living memory or are common in our

age group and class. But the entire range

of possibilities - a longer and inevitably

space for cataclysmic fires, suckings and

"Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Let us place

before our eyes in its entirety the nature of man's

lot. Not the kind of evil that often happens but

the very greatest evil that can possibly happen

At one point, a friend of Seneca's lost  a son.

And the consoling thoughts run in the similar direction.

was devastated by the death of her son Metilius, not yet 25.

Three years after the death, her sorrow have not

abated one bit. Indeed it was growing stronger everyday

So Seneca sent her an essay in which he expressed

the hope that given the length of time that elapsed

since Metilius' death, she would forgive him for going beyond the usual

condolenses to deliver something darker but

To lose a son was surely the greatest grief that could befall a mother.

But given the vulnerability of the human frame,

Metilius’ early death had its place in a merciless

He wrote: “We never anticipate evils before

So many funerals passed our doors,  yet we never dwell on death.

How they well done the toga,  serve in the army,

but how mad to love them without remembering

that no one had offered us a guarantee that they would

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Why Stoicism Matters

meditation

privilege

resilience

ancient