Note: This post is part of a weekly series called ‘Seneca Sundays’. Each week, I reflect on one of Seneca’s ‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’, and summarise the most practical and useful principles to share with you.
In this letter, Seneca challenges us to rethink our perspective on death.
We all share death’s inevitability. And it has either scared, or still scares, all of us.
However, Seneca’s advice on death isn’t morbid, in fact it helps us to live richer and fuller lives.
1. Death doesn’t stay with us, so there’s little to dread.
Death is a moment. It doesn’t persist.
Death is only worth dreading if it can remain with us, so “death must either not come at all, or else it must come and pass away.”
Seneca says we shouldn’t spend the few precious hours we have dreading the single, final hour. He reinforces this by saying, “No one can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.”
2. But, make sure to think about death every day
At first, this piece of advice seems odd. If we shouldn’t dread death, why then think about it regularly?
Seneca says, “Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly… Most people ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”
This idea reminded me of the Jon Foreman song ‘Learning How to Die’. The pre-chorus is melancholic, where Foreman is stuck in this “wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life”. But as the song transitions into the chorus, it becomes hopeful as the subject—a woman on her deathbed—realises that life’s hardships were simply taking her on a journey to learn how to die in peace.
Seneca rounds out this point by saying no thing can leave us truly happy unless we embrace that we could lose that thing at any moment.
3. Remember, it’s the pursuit of the superfluous that causes stress.
Seneca, as per his custom in each letter, ends with a useful but tangential point: we need little to quench our thirst, fend off hunger, and protect against the cold. These things are actually quite straightforward to attain. We need little to survive.
But rather, “it is the superfluous things for which people sweat, – the superfluous things that wear our togas threadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.”
What are the things we’re stressing about today? Is that stress really necessary? Can we recognise if we’re pursuing the necessary or the superfluous?