Stoics, Fight Club, Wealth, and Virtue

“I had it all.  Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” – Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is . . . be older than six.  And no swords.

Wealth – what is it?

Is it:

• Something that we sacrifice our lives for?
• Something we obsess about until it controls us?
• Something that is never . . . quite enough?
• Something we have to have more of than our neighbor?
• Something that defines our feelings about ourselves?

I’ll be honest, but there have been times I’ve viewed wealth in more than one of the categories above and acted as such.  “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” is what Epictetus wrote about 100 A.D.  Even more succinctly, Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (gosh darn) khakis.”

What Epictetus may have looked like.  If he were in a comic strip.

I may have it in for Johnny Depp, but Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is my spirit animal (we’ve started a tiny Fight Club in my basement, but I’m not supposed to talk about it – first rule, you know).

I keep coming back to the stoics.  What did Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Tyler Durden, and Epictetus think about wealth?  The website How To Be A Stoic says (LINK):  “. . . they classed everything that lies outside of virtue as either preferred or dispreferred indifferent. To the first group belong things like wealth, health, education, and high social standing; to the second things like poverty, sickness, ignorance, and low social standing. These things were preferred insofar it is normal for a human being to pursue them because it makes her life more comfortable, and dispreferred insofar it makes her life less comfortable. But they are “indifferent” in the sense that they are irrelevant to our ability to exercise the virtues . . . .”

So, the Stoics were indifferent to wealth, but it was better to have it than not.  You could be virtuous and poor, or you could be virtuous and rich.  If you were rich, perhaps you could share your virtues even further than if you were poor – so it was preferred to have money.  And Marcus Aurelius was emperor – it was hard to be richer than that, even for Jeff Bezos.  Seneca?  He was really wealthy, too.  And since they are some of the thinkers that literally define what Stoicism is, well, wealth and power isn’t off limits, but the goal was to live a virtuous life.

So what does wealth signify?

Mostly, wealth is like stored energy – it’s a potential.  A child may have a wealth of days before it, and an old miser a wealth of cash, cash that he might trade every dime of for just one more taste of youth.  And a six year old would trade the ages of 18-30 for six Cadbury Cream Eggs®, which is another reason that kids can’t vote.

Steve Jobs certainly traded some of his wealth for additional days of life without having to cheat a six year old in a candy deal – he could honestly say he could be at any liver in just a few hours (having a private jet and all) and he could afford to have a staff of people looking for ways to improve Steve’s chance of getting one.  Heck, Apple® has a project to clone Steve from a clump of his cells that they found in his comb – they just keep getting Ben Affleck copies instead.  Thankfully, Ben Affleck is not considered by the state of California to be a “living human.”

Steve’s wealth did buy him time – a few years, perhaps.  And Apple will soon sell the Affleck clones as iBens©.

Choices.  Wealth buys choices.  And one of the choices is always . . . not choosing right now.  The wonderful thing about being rich, is you don’t take any offers you don’t want.  If have to sell my car – I need the money for a new kidney for my Yosemite Sam© PEZ® dispenser, well, I have to have that money now.  I can’t wait.  I have to take the offer I get now.

If I have wealth and can afford to buy new, black market PEZ® kidneys for cash?  Well, I don’t have to sell my car.  In fact, if I have cash, I can look for people who have to sell kidney cars for PEZ© kidney cash to get a bargain.

I am willing to bet a large amount of PEZ™ that this is the first time the last sentence has been written in any language.

Anyhow.  Wealth buys choices, and wealth creates the conditions for more wealth.

But what creates wealth?  Well, in reality – the same virtues the stoics upheld (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – LINK):

“The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

• “Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
• “Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
• “Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
• “Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.”

If you will look – many (but not all!) of these virtues, if followed well and long enough, will lead to . . .  wealth.

But perhaps Epictetus was right:  “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

And then there was Tyler Durden:  “It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet or a comforter is?  Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word?  No.  What are we then?  We are consumers.  We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

So, be virtuous.  Get wealthy.  But don’t make the wealth the focus . . . it’s not the money, after all – it’s all the stuff.