Breakfast with Seneca by David Fideler

Author:David Fideler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

THE SEARCH FOR GOOD COMPANY

We should choose a healthy environment not only for our body but for our character too.

—Seneca, Letters 51.4

If crowds tend toward infectious, unhealthy behavior, what’s the alternative? After describing the violent, jeering behavior he saw in the amphitheater, Seneca advised Lucilius, “Spend time with those who will make you better, and welcome those you can improve. The process is mutual; and people learn while teaching.”15

If people with unhealthy characters surround us, the first and most crucial step is to escape from their presence. “A large part of sanity,” Seneca explains, “consists of letting go of those who encourage insanity and getting far away from a companionship that is mutually harmful.”16 The second step is to surround ourselves with people who have good characters, even if it’s a tiny group or a single person. That’s because virtuous people can influence us just as strongly as vicious people, but in reverse: “Just as poor health improves in a good location and a healthy climate, it is equally beneficial for a mind, lacking in strength, to associate with a better crowd.”17 In the same way bad qualities can be virally transmitted, good qualities can be contagious too. Seneca would have agreed, at least in principle, with the famous saying of business writer Jim Rohn, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with”—so we should choose those people with care.

This again highlights why friendships and meaningful relationships are crucial in Seneca’s philosophy. Spending time with people who possess good characters will help us make progress. “Good people are mutually helpful because they exercise each other’s virtues.” Even a Stoic sage “needs his virtues activated: for just as he exercises himself, so too is he exercised by another wise person.” In the same way that wrestlers and musicians practice and train, wise people need others to practice with and learn from.18 If we want to be wise and have good characters, we need to have those qualities “activated” in us by another person. And in order to activate another person’s good character, we must activate our own.

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