I

August  29th

WANT    NOTHING =   HAVE    EVERYTHING

“No person  has the power   to  have    everything  they    want,   but it  is  in  their   power   not to  want    what

they    don’t   have,   and to  cheerfully  put to  good    use what    they    do  have.”

—SENECA,    MORAL   LETTERS,    123.3

s there a person so rich that there is literally nothing they can’t afford? Surely there isn’t. Even the
richest people regularly fail in their attempts to buy elections, to purchase respect, class, love, and any
number of other things that are not for sale.
If obscene wealth will never get you everything you want, is that the end of it? Or is there another way
to solve for that equation? To the Stoics, there is: by changing what it is that you want. By changing how
you think, you’ll manage to get it. John D. Rockefeller, who was as rich as they come, believed that “a
man’s wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels
rich on $10 and has everything he desires, he really is rich.”
Today, you could try to increase your wealth, or you could take a shortcut and just want less.