This Is Poverty That’s Your Fault | No Shame In Needing Help

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is poverty that's your fault. There's a form of poverty that is not having enough. and this is a real and a tragic problem, a stroke of bad luck, and often a social injustice. And it's a shame the way that society looks down upon those who are struggling, as if it's always their fault, as if it says anything about them as a person.

But there was another form of poverty that Seneca talked about, and in fact knew himself, and it was this form of poverty that was actually pathetic. It's the poverty of wanting too much. All Seneca had to do was look around Rome to see it. There's a famous story of a man in Nero's court who threw himself at the emperor's feet, crying that he was down to his last million.

My God, Nero replied, how can you bear it? And sadly, this is a form of poverty all too common in the first world, perhaps even in your social circles. People who make good money but spend it even better, whose appetites outpace even their enormous incomes. In many cases, their poverty is self inflicted, the result of a lack of self discipline, not so much of laziness, but of excess.

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