Seneca on happiness 

We all want to be happy, we just don’t know how, says Seneca in his discourse On the Happy Life. He starts with the following advice: What we think will make us happy will not make us happy. If we want to be happy, we should stop following the crowd and think for ourselves. (We will explore this further in our future issues.) 

We don’t know how to be happy 

My brother Gallio, all human beings want to live happily. But they don’t see clearly what makes a life happy. If they take the wrong road to happiness, the more eagerly they struggle to be happy, the more they move away from it. Happiness becomes far from easy to achieve, because they are moving in the opposite direction. So, the faster they go, the more they move further away. 

We look for happiness in the wrong places 

We must therefore define clearly what is it that we want. Next, we must discover what path will quickly take us there. If we go on the right path, we can measure how much progress we have made each day and how close we are to our goal that we naturally desire. But if we keep wandering randomly without following any guide (except for the contradictory and unsolicited opinions offered by those advising us to go in different directions), we will waste our short lives in useless roaming, even though we work day and night to understand what we should do. 

We should stop following the crowd 

So, let’s not decide where we should proceed, and by what path, without the advice of an experienced person who has explored the territory we are about to enter. This journey does not follow the rules of other journeys. In other journeys, if we follow the tracks of others, it is impossible to go wrong. But in this journey, the most frequent tracks, the most beaten paths will lead us off course. Nothing is more important than this: we should not, like sheep, follow the group that has gone before us. We should go to the right place, not where others are going. 

Don’t follow untested advice 

Nothing gets us into greater trouble than our belief in untested advice; our habit of thinking that what others think is good must be good; believing counterfeits as being truly good; and living our life not by reason, but by imitating others. Thus, people rush to the same place imitating each other, pile one atop another, and form a great heap. When there is a great rush of people, the crowd falls on itself. No one can fall without pulling someone else down upon him. Those who go before destroy those follow them. You can see the same thing in human life. You cannot go wrong all by yourself – you must become both the cause and advisor of another person’s wrongdoing. 

We perish because we follow others 

Following in the footsteps of those who went before us is harmful. Because we believe others rather than our own opinions, we never pass judgment upon life. We get mixed up in some common error and face our ruin. We perish because we follow the example of others. We should be cured of this, if we want to move away from the crowd. The way things are, the crowd is ready to defend its own mistake by fighting against reason. 

During an election, public opinion turns around. The electorate admires those who are elected to different offices. We approve and disapprove of the same things decided by the majority. 

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In the first chapter of his discourse ON THE HAPPY LIFE, Seneca warns us against following the crowd blindly. This chapter is an excerpt from Stoic Happiness, a plain English version of Seneca’s On the Happy Life, published by The Stoic Gym. https://amzn.to/2I0mbVW

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