Stoic Mindset: Living Virtuously to Reveal Your Truth 

• Written for a philosophy exam: Explain what stoics mean by the following passage (quoted from Reading 33 by Sedley): “Everybody wants to be rich, free, powerful, beautiful, loveable, and so on, but, paradoxically, only the wise achieve these goals. Everyone else is, whatever they may think, actually poor, enslaved, powerless, ugly and unlovable.”

There is a spiritual element to this quote that has pragmatic implications. Essentially, the quote suggests that truly wealthy individuals are wise people who have achieved mental freedom. Conversely, those who are not wise, though they may believe themselves to be wealthy, are merely deluding themselves. How is this possible? Well, wisdom involves understanding the ego and its socially conditioned tendency to pursue desire endlessly. Wise people recognize that chasing these desires, such as money, social status, and physical beauty, is like pouring water into a cup with a small hole at the bottom.

Thanks to their wisdom, truly wealthy people are liberated from socially conditioned desires and, therefore, are truly free. They understand that at the base of every human pursuit is a need for virtue.

In simple terms, a wise person embodies the virtue of love to connect with others and experience a genuine sense of belonging, while an unwise person, who is ‘enslaved,’ may attempt to attain wealth and elevate their status to achieve the same inner state. However, the unwise person may never reach this state because it is reached through virtue, not possession. Virtue is the highest form of wealth and the truest form of beauty, as the Stoics would say: ‘True beauty is the beauty of the soul.’

Pragmatically speaking, wise people are capable of achieving whatever they desire materialistically too, for the most part. To know what you want, you must be wise. The wise understand that the underlying goal is to be virtuous. Interestingly, when you embody virtue, you often become successful. For example, businesses and jobs revolve around solving problems. A virtuous person’s honesty enables them to clearly identify where their skills can be most useful, leading to inevitable, exponential, and unexpected success. Of course, you are likely to succeed if you do what you are good at and this truth is revealed through living virtuously.