Can the Stoic philosophy of controlling your reactions and emotions bring financial prosperity?

The entire philosophy of Stoicism is built on the idea of the “golden mean,” which is sometimes referred to as the “middle way.” From the beginning, the Stoics took a balanced position between two other philosophical movements of the time, namely, Cynicism and Epicureanism.

The Cynics also believed that we become happy when we live in agreement with nature, free from the desire for material possessions and social status. But unlike the Stoics, they believed that social constructs (like money) were not a part of living naturally. The Stoics believed we should adapt to society. Epicureans, on the other hand, believed that we can achieve happiness by pursuing pleasure while avoiding pain. The Epicureans and Stoics both agreed that we can achieve mental tranquillity by living a simple and moderate life. But the Stoics didn’t believe in avoiding pain – or anything that’s natural, for that matter.

The Stoics chose the middle path. They didn’t renounce the pleasures of society, nor did they run away from hardship. They offered a balanced view on every topic in life.

Seneca, one of the wealthier Stoics, talked about the golden mean in relation to money and its excess as follows: “You ask what is the proper measure of wealth? The best measure is to have what is necessary, and next best, to have enough.” He agrees with Bogle. We shouldn’t renounce wealth like the Cynics, because we need it to live a good life. But we also don’t need it in excess so we can fulfill all our desires like the Epicureans.

Balance is easy to define but difficult to achieve. It’s in our nature to lean toward excess. In fact, our society emphasises extremes, and many of us believe it’s normal to live on the edge. In finance, you can see that by the amount of credit that’s used by investors. When the post-COVID stock market boom started to take off in September 2020, a survey showed that 43 per cent of individual investors said they used a form of credit to invest in the stock market.

Using leverage magnifies your potential losses, but it also magnifies your potential profit. Some investors like the idea of winning it all. However, they don’t properly consider the possibility of losing it all. It takes decades to build wealth, but it can get destroyed within a matter of weeks or months.

If you adopt the golden mean, you won’t get rich quickly, but you also won’t get poor quickly. This trade-off is one that a Stoic would take any day of the week. Living with balance is hard in our modern world, where we’re constantly exposed to success stories on social media. We want that for ourselves too. So these stories push us to pursue more of everything.

There is only one way we can ensure we stay balanced: by training ourselves every day. This is one of the most important ideas Musonius Rufus shared in his teachings. He said: “Could someone acquire instant self-control by merely knowing that he must not be conquered by pleasures but without training to resist them?”

In Stoicism, you will find a variety of exercises that inspire you to live better. The idea is that we can never eradicate certain emotions like greed. After all, these are human emotions that happen subconsciously. We can only train our ability to neutralize greed when we feel the emotion. Here are two of the most useful and simplest Stoic exercises to help you adhere to the golden mean.

Desire only what’s within your control

Epictetus says, “If you desire something outside your control, you are bound to be disappointed.” And yet, if you ask any person what they want in life, they nearly always list things that are outside their control:

“I want to generate 20 per cent returns this year.”

“When I achieve my income target this quarter, I’ll be happy.”

“I’m going to work out every day and eat healthy so I can live a long life.”

“My goal is to get married by the time I’m thirty, have my first child when I’m thirty-two, and another one when I’m thirty-four.”

Every single one of those desires lies outside our control. We can invest in the market, but we can’t control the returns. We can try to boost our income, and even if it works, we can still be unhappy. We can work out as much as we want, but we can’t control whether we get in an accident or become ill. We can start a relationship, but we can’t control our partner’s actions or our fertility.

Despite these obvious observations, we insist on desiring things outside our control every day. According to the Stoics, there’s nothing wrong with desire, as long as we focus on the things we control. We can desire to improve our knowledge and skills. We can desire to become kinder in the way we treat others. But the moment we desire things that are outside our control, we’re opening the gateway to greed. To avoid greed, we must change our self-talk when it comes to those things we don’t control. If we can change our language, we eventually change our desires.

Go from: I need/want/wish X to happen.

To: It would be nice if X happens.

When I started writing this book, I noticed I would daydream about how the book would become a bestseller and how I would get invited to appear on podcasts and talk shows. I would think, I want to sell a million copies and have it hit the bestseller list. Eventually, I adjusted my self-talk. I thought, What would someone like Seneca think if he wrote a book?

If it becomes a success, great; if it doesn’t, great. We don’t control outcomes. We control our effort. I soon started pouring all my energy into writing the best personal investing book in the world. That’s my aim. And to me, this is the best book. If others agree, that’s great; if they don’t, I’m good with that too. Because being liked by others is outside my control, I have no care for it.

Epictetus called this restricting yourself to “choice and refusal.” It means that you deliberately choose or refuse every single thing in life over which you have control. You can choose to focus on what you control. You can refuse to get blinded by desire

Moderate your habits

To live according to the golden mean, we must have selfcontrol. And to train our ability to control ourselves, it’s best to start with the most important thing in life: our habits. And according to Musonius, moderation starts with our diet.

Musonius wrote: “The person who eats more than he should makes a mistake. So does the person who eats in a hurry, the person who is enthralled by gourmet food, the person who favours sweets over nutritious foods, and the person who does not share his food equally with his fellow diners.” A Stoic should:

1. Never eat more than needed

2. Take enough time to consume food

3. Avoid gourmet food (which is generally pleasurable, calorie-dense, luxurious)

4. Avoid sweets

5. Share food with others

If you struggle with self-control, moderating your eating habits is a great way to improve. From there, you can apply moderation to all your habits, which will give you more balance.

I know this from experience. Eating in moderation is something I struggled with in my teens. When I was sixteen and at my heaviest, I weighed 240 pounds. Being overweight bothered me mentally but even more so physically.

When I decided to lose weight, I saw a dietician. She gave me some tips to lose weight, which I can’t remember anymore, except for one thing, which I can recount exactly: “Never finish your entire meal as you are trying to lose weight. Always leave just a little bit on your plate. Just a tiny bit, something you think a small animal like a mouse would eat. This is not about limiting your calories. It’s about self-control.”

Her advice changed the way I ate forever. Within one year, I had lost around fifty pounds through working out six days a week and eating fewer calories than I burned. Once I hit a healthy weight, I always focused on eating enough rather than as much as I could. My weight has been roughly the same for twenty years now.

Every now and then, when I notice I get too greedy with my food, I apply the “leave just a little bit on your plate” technique. It reminds me of the fact that I’m in control of what I eat.

We often underestimate how powerful our self-control is. We assume that our desires are stronger than our self-control. We think it’s normal to give in to excess. We can’t eat just a handful of chips; we need to eat the whole bag. We can’t be satisfied with 10 percent returns in the market; we must have 100 per cent.

The way you eat influences the way you live. Indeed, every mealtime or snack offers you a chance to practice. If you’re able to eat in moderation, you’re also able to live in moderation. Start with what you eat, and the rest of your life will follow.

The underlying principles are the same, whether you apply this thinking to food or to money. When you forget about moderation, you’re lost. When you exert self-control, with your diet and with your money, you’re in equilibrium. This is what great Stoics and great investors have in common. They are always balanced, whether the market is optimistic or pessimistic. They don’t get sucked into the extremes, no matter how big the pull. They are satisfied with having enough.

How many clothes do you really wear? How many cars do you need? How many accessories and pieces of furniture can you keep in your house? How many tech gadgets do you use?

The answer to all of the above is often “Not that many.” Most of us even prefer living a simple life over the constant pressure to accumulate more.

Meditate on the fact that you get used to everything. Even if you do have many possessions, soon enough, you will get used to everything you own. You can’t find lasting pleasure in objects. You can find it only inside yourself.

If you desire anything, desire to live a simple life.

Excerpted with permission from The Stoic Path to Wealth: Ancient Wisdom for Enduring Prosperity, Darius Foroux, Portfolio/Penguin.