September 17, 2026

Train While Fortune Smiles

It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence.

Seneca wrote this during the Saturnalia, when Rome given over to feasting and excess, urging his friend Lucilius to do the opposite of his neighbors and practice scarcity instead. He goes on to compare the practice to a soldier who drills and builds earthworks with no enemy in sight, so that real war finds him ready. The point is not suffering for its own sake but rehearsal: the body and mind that have tasted plain food, rough cloth, and cold learn that comfort was never the thing keeping them safe. Stoics from Musonius to Seneca treated voluntary discomfort as training, deliberately setting aside a few days a month to live on little, so that poverty or loss, if it came, would arrive as familiar ground rather than catastrophe. The practice builds a kind of proof, tested in advance, that a good day does not depend on soft food or a warm bed.

A principle of Stoicism: Voluntary Discomfort →