“Show me someone who isn’t a slave! One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to power, and all are slaves to fear. I could name a former Consul who is a slave to a little old woman, a millionaire who is the slave of the cleaning woman… No servitude is more abject than the self-imposed.”
SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 47.17
We all have dependencies, and we’re all addicted to various things.
Author Ryan Holiday focuses mostly on physical addictions when he explains Seneca’s quote on today’s page of The Daily Stoic — guilty pleasures and vices, which are really their own punishment. These are things that we think we can’t do without.
But I feel like Seneca’s quote runs deeper than that. I think the main point he was trying to make is that “all are slaves to fear” — and that is more about psychological hangups and addictions.
We’re afraid of being cut off from love. We’re afraid of running out of money, running out of food. Sometimes we’re afraid of running out of some creature comfort that we don’t actually need.
Often we have a fear of not being able to continue living in the house or location where we want to live. Or we work ourselves into an irrational fear about our physical security.
And we do this to ourselves. We enslave ourselves to fear, whether or not it’s justified. We create the handcuffs.
And nothing is sadder than that. “No servitude is more abject than the self-imposed”, Seneca says. A tragic hell of our own making.
Here’s the good news — it’s a choice. We have the keys to freedom, right in front of us. We can choose not to live in irrational fear. We can liberate ourselves from these chains.
