The True Cost of Everything — Letters from a Stoic

Not everyone who calls themselves good has earned the title. Letter 42 opens with Seneca questioning Lucilius's assessment of a man who has recently declared himself reformed. True goodness is rare, rarer, he says, than the phoenix, which appears perhaps once in five hundred years. Ordinary prosperity produces ordinary people. What is extraordinary becomes so precisely by being uncommon.

The test Seneca applies to the man in question: he thinks ill of evil men. So do evil men themselves. He hates those who abuse sudden power. Give him the same power, and watch. Vice isn't absent in the powerless, it's merely frozen, like a cold snake that still has all its venom.

The letter turns to a more fundamental argument about the true cost of things. We think of 'buying' as handing over cash. But the most expensive purchases are the ones we make with ourselves, our time, our anxiety, our freedom, our dignity. We hand those over eagerly for things we could not live without, when in truth we lived without them for years. His measure of the man who has truly found himself: he has lost nothing.

He who owns himself is never diminished by the loss of anything outside himself. How few men are blessed with that ownership.