PERSON
Seneca
The Stoic philosopher who served the most powerful man in the world, watched that man descend into monstrousness, and wrote, from a position of extreme danger, the most searching ancient account of how a person maintains inner freedom when external circumstances are entirely beyond their control.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) was a Roman senator, playwright, and philosopher who became the most influential advisor in the Western world under the Emperor Nero—and who was ordered to die by that same emperor twenty years later. Between those two facts lies the most instructive life in the Stoic tradition: a thinker who tested his philosophy against the greatest possible pressure. His
letters to Lucilius, his treatise
On the Shortness of Life, and his essays on anger, tranquility, and the
preferred indifferent constitute the most accessible entry into the Stoic tradition and the one most directly applicable to the present technological transition. The framework Seneca inherited from Zeno and Epictetus and made his own is the
dichotomy of control: all phenomena divide into those within our power—opinion, judgment, desire, effort—and those outside it—the actions of others, the market, history, the advance of technology. Energy directed