Financially, I’m doing pretty well.
My books sell more than you’d think books about ancient philosophy would sell (actually, you can preorder the new one here)…and it turns out that starting a bookstore in a small town in rural Texas was not actually the dumbest business idea in the world.
I was lucky to have a decent ten years in marketing before I became a full-time author, and I made some good investments along the way. I’ve saved and I try to live within my means.
So when I say that when I look at my life, I feel poorer than I’d like to be, I don’t mean I’m not doing well. This would be insulting to the single mothers out there, the people crippled by medical debt and to the underclasses that the modern economy exploits.
The reason I am thinking about this at all comes after a conversation I had with Sahil Bloom, who has a new book about the different types of wealth, on the Daily Stoic podcast (you can listen to the episode here or watch it on YouTube). Along with financial wealth, there is time wealth, he says. And social wealth. And mental wealth. And physical wealth.
He’s right.
I’ve met some billionaires that I would have no trouble describing as poor—not just because they had an endless desire for more (which was Seneca’s definition), but because their lives were a mess, because they were preposterously insecure, because they were estranged from their families, because they had few friends, because they didn’t take care of themselves.
I don’t say this to judge; after all, I started this very piece by alluding to the fact that I’m not as rich as I’d like to be in a few areas.
For instance, as I’ve said before, I feel like—despite my net worth and career success—I am far too anxious and stressed out. Not so much about the state of the world, but about things needing to go well.
I often get nervous when I fly. Not because we might crash, but what if we’re delayed and I miss the talk I am supposed to be giving? Or what if I’m delayed and my schedule gets messed up and I fall behind? Objectively, this is silly! I would be fine financially if I had to cancel something or if events conspired to prevent it from happening. I am way ahead of my deadlines and am perfectly able to absorb some setbacks. Yet here I am, acting like I’m on the razor’s edge.
Anxiety, I’ve come to realize, is a very expensive habit. It has cost me so much. A lot of misery, a lot of frustration, countless hours of sleep. It’s caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me. How many family dinners have I ruined by letting my mind wander to what could go wrong? How many minutes of vacations have I missed out on because I was preoccupied, lost in spirals about things that hadn’t happened? How many opportunities have I passed up because I was too caught up in my own fears? How many nights did I waste lying awake at night, worrying about what might or might not happen?
The tragedy of anxiety is that it feeds on itself. Like the ancient symbol of the snake devouring its own tail, anxiety consumes resources that could be used to discard it.
I carry this reminder with me—a medallion engraved with Epictetus’ phrase, ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin (“What is up to us, what is not up to us”). On the back is a quote from Seneca: “He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.”
It creates real problems from its obsession with imaginary ones. When you have fears that you might run out of money or luck or you feel like your career could end, it affects how you organize your life and your finances. You leave hours earlier for the airport than you need to, only to sit at the gate. You ruminate on the past or the future at the expense of the project you could be working on. You stress about money so much that you don’t put it to use in ways that would make your life less stressful. My wife and I, as we repeatedly try to remind each other, should not be living the way we are. That is to say, we have too much on our plates and not enough people helping us. We’re doing too well financially to feel so anxious, so stressed out, so compelled to do and put up with certain things.
When you live this way, it doesn’t matter your income—you are spending down your capital. You are depleting the accounts of your relationships and of your own happiness.
I am not as busy as some people I know, but I am too busy. Just this week, I was trying to put a doctor’s appointment in my calendar and found I could not. Some people can’t afford to go to the doctor, but some of us, for very different reasons, apparently can’t ‘afford’ it either. I would have to cancel something or miss out on something.
If you’re too busy to take care of your health…can you really say you’re doing well?
I know I would be better off if I had more friends. That’s one of the downsides of success, too. Not only can it isolate you and alienate you from others—this thing we call ‘fame’ is weird, especially if you are already introverted—it makes you a little suspicious. It makes you a little guarded. It makes you a little more inclined to stay in the privacy of your home or office. But mostly what success does is suck up your time. As my friend Austin Kleon has said, “work, family, scene—pick two.” I love my family and I love my work. That doesn’t leave as much time for friends. And he and I talked about that very thing last time we hung out: Why don’t we do this more? Of course, we both know why. It’s a shame…and it’s a privileged impoverishment.
It’s weird to think that as a kid, when I had no money, I would just go over to a friend’s house and just hang out. Nothing scheduled. We didn’t even have anything to do, but we’d spend hours together. It’s weird to think back and be jealous of that kid…but I am. He had something I don’t have any more.
I love where I live, this little ranch we have outside Austin. It was a huge swing, financially, when we bought it. Getting the mortgage almost didn’t happen–banks weren’t exactly lining up to lend money to a self-employed writer at the beginning of his career, trying to buy farm land. We managed to get it and it’s one of the best things we’ve ever done.
We’re tucked away from the noise, the distractions, the rush of the city. We live off an unpaved road. It’s pitch black at night…we’re surrounded by thousands of trees. I look out over a lake, filled with fish and ducks and turtles. We raise cows and donkeys. I can hunt deer and hogs. I love just standing there in the evening and watching the Texas sunset settle over the ranch.
But you know what? I don’t spend enough time at it…or rather, on it. I used to do most of the repairs myself. My wife and I would go out and feed the cows every day I delivered the hay each week. I checked the fences after a storm. Not so much anymore. Partly, because we got the place in pretty good and self-sustaining shape—that was the systems-thinkers in us. We also bought out a neighbor and instead of dragging away the mobile home that sits in a corner of that property, found a wonderful family that we rent it out to in exchange for help with all those chores.
It’s a relief, for sure, but you know what? I miss it. Weeks go by sometimes, and I realize I have not walked more than a few paces from our house (our family walks are usually on our road). It makes me think of one of the most moving and insightful passages in John Graves’ classic book Goodbye to a River
“A rooting, poking, dog-trailed child turning over stones in a creek bed, or a broke old man wandering back from a pulp mill in Oregon to toe-nudge rusty cans and the shards of crocks at the spot where his father’s homestead once stood, or a drifter in a boat on a river, can all own it right from under you if you don’t watch out. Can own it in a real way, own it with an eye and brain and heart…”
If all I’m doing is looking at it from the back window, do I really own it? Do I really need to own it?
I guess what I am saying is that when I think about a “rich life”—to borrow a phrase from my friend Ramit Sethi—I don’t think that much about money. Actually, that’s my point: Isn’t that the point of having money? To not have to think about it? It’s a life where you feel good, where you feel secure, where you think about what you want to think about.
I remember earlier in my writing career, a time when I would take pretty much every opportunity to do an interview for any newspaper or magazine or podcast or radio show, I got an email one evening to appear live on a radio show the next morning. As I started to reply that I would do it, I thought, I have to change my whole day around tomorrow for this. Which was not unusual—I often reluctantly moved things around for these kinds of things. What was unusual was the next thought, which was, I don’t have to do this. Even if the appearance somehow led to 10,000 extra book sales, it wasn’t going to change my life in any meaningful way. So why not just keep the day I already planned? That moment of realization—that I could say no—changed my life more than any amount of money ever had.
That’s a step towards the life I want.
There are people with enormous fortunes who don’t have that freedom. It’s like that scene at the beginning of Billions where he says, What’s the point of having ‘fuck you money’ if you never say ‘fuck you’? That’s too rude, obviously, so what about just, No thanks. Or, Not right now.
We talk about this in the Daily Stoic Wealth Challenge. You might think Seneca was the richest of the Stoics, but in fact, he is our model of “The Poorest Stoic” throughout the challenge. He was under the thumb of money and ambition and power and status—the things that attracted him to Nero’s service. In thirteen years working for a man who was clearly deranged and evil, Seneca became one of Rome’s richest men, something he paid a tremendous price for. “Many people,” Seneca himself would write, “have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.” The fever had Seneca, trapping him in a gilded cage he eventually realized he couldn’t buy his way out of.
Epictetus, by contrast, clawed his way out of slavery, but was actually far richer and far more free than Seneca and the other ‘rich’ and ‘powerful’ men and women of the time who who had been acquired and ruled by Nero, by ambition, by money, by desire, by fame, by their jobs, their insecurities, their possessions. There’s a great story I love about Epictetus being robbed of a prized lamp, but he shrugs it off because he doesn’t care that much about material possessions. He was able to live just as happily without them. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions,” he said, “but in having few wants.”
About a year ago, I was working in my office above the bookstore and called my wife to see what she was up to. “Hey,” she said, “the kids and I are at the park.” “Oh,” I said, “I’ll just come over there.” And I got up from my desk in the middle of the work day and walked over to play with them at the park.
I can do that because of financial reasons. I can do that because of lifestyle logistics reasons, because we chose to live in this little town. I can do that because my wife and kids want to be around me and I want to be around them. I can do that because, fortunately, I’m in decent physical shape. I can do that if I do the work on myself and remember that I don’t have to be stressed about this or that deadline.
And as I walked over to the park, it hit me,
Oh, this is what I work for.
How lucky am I? How great is this?
I could be a billionaire and not be able to do this.
Now if I could just stay in that state of mind more of the time, well, I’d really be doing well.
Written by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as Grammy Award winning musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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