🦉 The Wisdom School
The Wisdom School is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project, an organization dedicated to providing tools for the art of living. Here, you’ll find short clips from In Search of Wisdom, along with selected readings from ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lessons from Seneca with David Fideler
In this episode of The Wisdom School — I share a short clip from my conversation with David Fideler (author of Breakfast with Seneca). You’ll hear David discuss ancient lessons for modern living inspired by Seneca’s writing.
Here’s a portion of the transcript:
Josh — Maybe we can transition into some of the lessons. And one that comes up is friendship. What can we learn from Seneca on the topic of friendship?
—
David — Friendship was very important to him. He writes about friendship quite a lot in the early letters to Lucilius. You can see that these person-to-person relationships were very important for Seneca. As I mentioned earlier, all of his writings are addressed to different friends or family members. So he saw a person-to-person relationship as important in philosophy and Stoic philosophy in particular because one of the main aims of Roman Stoic philosophy was to develop a better character.
That's very hard to do in isolation. He also wrote about how the people close to us can influence our characters unconsciously, either for the ill or for the good. So he felt that it was essential to seek out friends who have good character because those good qualities will rub off on you in some way. […]
—
Josh — Another topic that comes up in his writing and maybe most popular is On the Shortness of Life. The idea of wasting time and passing through life carelessly. Could you speak a bit about that?
—
David — Right. That was one of his favorite themes. When he was younger, he wrote On the Shortness of Life. And I think he may have written that when he was actually engaged in helping to run the Roman Empire, so he would have been very busy. He was an extreme critic of busyness for the sake of being busy or busyness for the sake of display because sometimes people just run around and act busy, but they don't accomplish anything of substance.
For Seneca, time was our greatest asset; while people will look over their financial assets or property, many people don't care about how they spend their time. […]
—
Thank you for listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
P.S. Feel free to comment, ask questions, or make suggestions!