The speaker’s favorite line from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is “Happiness is possible even in a palace,” which he rephrases as “Happiness is possible even if you’re rich, even if you’re powerful, even if you have unlimited access to sex and food.”
This line inverts two common assumptions about happiness:
First, that wealth, power, fame, and luxury are purely good, when in fact they can be impediments to happiness.
Second, that external circumstances determine happiness, when in fact happiness remains within your control even amid impediments.
The speaker uses the Roman emperor Tiberius as a cautionary example of how worldly goods can corrupt.
Tiberius was the second emperor of Rome, adopted son of Augustus, who in his later years moved his entire administration to the island of Capri.
He was drawn to Capri because its dramatic cliffs made the island nearly inaccessible, giving him something he lacked as the most powerful man in the world: privacy.
That privacy, however, enabled his descent into tyranny: he hosted orgies, engaged in pedophilia, and used a cliff called “Tiberius’s leap” to throw political opponents and former lovers to their deaths.
Tiberius is an extreme case, but the broader point applies to everyone: excess of worldly goods can corrupt just as their absence can harm.
The Stoics drew this idea from Plato’s Euthydemus, which argues that commonly prized goods, good looks, honor, wealth, luxury, food, sex, are goods you can have too much of.
People tend to recognize how lacking money, status, or beauty can make life worse, but rarely consider how excess can do the same.
Examples:
Wealthy children who fail to develop their potential because they expect an inheritance.
Very rich men or very beautiful women who attract the wrong partners because the dating market overvalues those traits.
The Euthydymus concludes that only one good always improves your life regardless of circumstance: wisdom.
Wisdom is the skill of knowing how to live well and act rightly whether you are rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, healthy or unhealthy.
It is the ability to handle whatever life throws at you.
