Practice like a Stoic: 33, Set up social rules for living

Seneca’s rules of living

Image from picpedia.org, CC license.

[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 195-196 of the paperback edition.]

“It is the act of a generous spirit to proportion its efforts not to its own strength but to that of “human nature, to entertain lofty aims, and to conceive plans that are too vast to be carried into execution even by those who are endowed with gigantic intellects, who appoint for themselves the following rules:

I will look upon death or upon a comedy with the same expression of countenance.

I will submit to labors, however great they may be, supporting the strength of my body by that of my mind.

I will despise riches when I have them as much as when I have them not; if they be elsewhere I will not be more gloomy, if they sparkle around me I will not be more lively than I should otherwise be.Whether Fortune comes or goes I will take no notice of her.

I will view all lands as though they belong to me, and my own as though they belonged to all mankind . . .

Whatever I may possess, I will neither hoard it greedily nor squander it recklessly. I will think that I have no possessions so real as those which I have given away to deserving people. I will not reckon benefits by their magnitude or number, or by anything except the value set upon them by the receiver.

I never will consider a gift to be a large one if it be bestowed upon a worthy object.

I will do nothing because of public opinion, but everything because of conscience; whenever I do anything alone by myself I will believe that the eyes of the Roman people are upon me while I do it.

In eating and drinking my object shall be to quench the desires of Nature, not to fill and empty my belly.I will be agreeable with my friends, gentle and mild to my foes.

I will grant pardon before I am asked for it, and will meet the wishes of honorable men half way.

I will bear in mind that the world is my native city, that its governors are the gods, and that they stand above and around me, criticizing whatever I do or say.

Whenever either Nature demands my breath again, or reason bids me dismiss it, I will quit this life, calling all to witness that I have loved a good conscience, and good pursuits; that no “one’s freedom, my own least of all, has been impaired through me.

He who sets up these as the rules of his life will soar aloft and strive to make his way to the gods.” (Seneca, On the Happy Life, 20)