“We must give up many things to which we are addicted,” says Seneca in one of his letters. These actions can shape how others see us. More importantly, they affect how we perceive ourselves. Even the small addictions which appear harmless erode our courage, self-respect, and ultimately our freedom. This mini-essay will examine Seneca’s argument on the importance of giving up addictions from a Stoic perspective.
Addictions are more than the major ones which we imagine. We naturally turn our minds to tobacco, alcohol, and narcotics when we think of addictions, but in actuality, almost anything can be addictive. What Seneca is referring to are the so-called harmless indulgences which start out small, like a wake me up coffee or a mid-afternoon cake, but turn into something that we cannot function without.
The list of these small indulgences could be longer than War and Peace, but here are a few: the morning coffee, sodas, snacks, checking our phones, doomscrolling, and even complaining and gossiping – as Ryan Holiday notes in The Daily Stoic, can become addictive.
Think back to Marcus Aurelius, another Stoic philosopher, trying to get himself out of bed on a cold morning. He believed that spending too much time resting in bed constituted pleasure. For him pleasure prioritised feelings over our purpose – the reason why we were born, or in his words, a man’s work – meaning the work proper to one’s nature.
Every morning, I wake up and check my phone while lying in bed. I am neglecting a man’s work for the pleasure of lying in a warm bed and I am addicted to the small indulgence of checking football scores, overnight messages, and Instagram reels. Before I know it an hour has passed and I need to rush to shower, get dressed, and prepare my lunch.
If these addictions are bad, what happens if we give in to them? Seneca has an answer – courage will vanish. For him, courage should always be challenged or it will wither away and greatness will be lost. This is similar to John Stuart Mill’s idea that the truth should always be challenged so that it does not fall into dogma. So too with courage. Challenging what we know, challenging who we are, and challenging what we can do are essential to both growing as a person, but also maintaining the person we are. We are blind to the laws of entropy if we imagine we might coast at the same level for eternity.
Among the English before 1066, there seems to have been the idea of maegen. To the Maori, this is mana. While we cannot fully explore the English notion, its similarity to the fully fleshed idea of mana, tells us something about it. That idea is that positive actions build us up and negative ones break us down. The idea of maegen and mana are much like Seneca’s idea on strengthening or weakening our greater selves. There is the external and the internal. Of the two, we too readily focus on the former and neglect the latter.
This reveals a subtler form of addiction: self-worth outsourcing. In being addicted to the opinions of others, we lose the courage to be ourselves. This is something I have tried to instil in naughty students. I explain to them that their actions are designed to make some people think highly of them, while the majority think less of them—but more importantly, that by acting this way they subconsciously weaken their own view of themselves – and with it, their courage.
To be honest, I do not think it has worked – my Japanese is not very good and convincing others has never been my strong point, but I hope they at least think about it.
If this is so and that these bad habits are making us lesser than we can be, how is this achieved? One of the definitions of an addiction is the inability to abstain from said activity or substance. This in itself is a loss of freedom for the individual and a loss of sovereignty. Furthermore, if our minds are turned over to the thought of the addiction – either in anticipation of it or anxiety over the loss of it, then we not only lose our sense of calm, but the world becomes less clear. Our focus is ruined.
I have seen this happen to myself. It happened in increments and it came from different sources. Some came at different times and some have become perennial. Often multiple addictions competed to shatter my discipline and focus. I let them lead me away from my core purpose and to a certain extent, still do. It has become an ongoing battle to not waste my life.
Therefore, one of the key battles we must wage within ourselves is to not only to force ourselves out of bed – to begin the day’s work as a man, but to retain or regain the ability to abstain. Each act of resistance is a step towards a greater soul and each bending of the knee to the addiction is a step towards losing our courage.