A FOOTNOTE TO THE NAME - FOUR DEAD ROMANS
Who Were the Stoics?
The people who took mortality seriously and lived better because of it.
If you've read the page, you know I lean on the Stoics a fair amount. They show up in the Quote of the Week. They show up in the philosophy behind this whole project. They show up because nobody — before or since — has thought more clearly about how to live well in the face of the fact that none of us are getting out of this alive.
Which is to say: they are the original estate planners, in a sense. They were the first people to write down, at length and with real seriousness, what it means to take your own mortality as a planning constraint and live accordingly. The plan they were writing was for the soul rather than the assets, but the underlying move is the same — acknowledge the deadline, then act like it's real.
Here's the short version of who they were and why I keep quoting them.
THE BACKGROUND
Stoicism wasn’t a religion. It was a practice — a way of training the mind to behave well under pressure.
It started in Athens around 300 BC, when a shipwrecked merchant named Zeno of Citium lost everything in a wreck off the Greek coast, wandered into a bookshop, started reading Socrates, and decided to spend the rest of his life thinking about how to live. He began teaching beneath a covered porch in the Athenian agora — the Stoa Poikilē, the "Painted Porch." His students were called the people of the porch. Stoics.
The school ran, in one form or another, for about five hundred years. It moved from Athens to Rome. It picked up emperors and slaves along the way. Almost none of its early writings survive — most of what we have today comes from four men writing in the first and second centuries AD, all of them Roman.
What held the whole tradition together was a single, stubborn idea: almost nothing that happens to you is in your control, but everything about how you respond to it is. Train the response, and the world can do what it wants to you. Forget to train it, and the world will run you over.
THE FOUR WE STILL READ
The concept of this newsletter (and many of the quotes I use) comes from one of these four. They lived within about 150 years of each other. They never all met. They had almost nothing in common except the philosophy - which tells you something about the philosophy.
i - THE STATESMAN
Seneca the Younger
c. 4 BC - 65 AD - Rome - Senator, playwright, advisor to Nero
The richest of the four and the most complicated. Seneca was Nero's tutor and, for a while, the man trying to keep an unstable emperor from doing something catastrophic. It didn't end well — Nero eventually ordered him to take his own life, and Seneca, in keeping with his philosophy, did so calmly while continuing to dictate to his secretary.
His Letters to Lucilius — written to a friend in the last years of his life — read like the smartest, most honest emails you've ever received. Short, conversational, unsparing about his own failings. If you read one Stoic, read these.
why he shows up here
“Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day." (Yes, that’s the line on the page.)
Ii - THE former slave
Epictetus
c. 50 - 135 AD - Phrygia & Nicopolis - Slave turned schoolmaster
Born into slavery in what is now Turkey, sold to a brutal master in Nero's court, lamed (by some accounts) when that master broke his leg in a fit of temper. Eventually freed, eventually exiled by an emperor who didn't like philosophers, eventually founded the most influential Stoic school in history in northwest Greece.
He wrote nothing. Everything we have was scribbled down by a devoted student. The result — the Enchiridion, "the handbook" — is fifty-three pages long and has been carried by Roman generals, Civil War officers, and Vietnam POWs.
why he shows up here
“It is not things that disturb us, but our judgments about things.” Useful at a settlement table. Useful in a difficult client meeting. Useful most places, actually.
IIi - THE emperor
Marcus Aurelius
121 - 180 AD - Rome - Emperor, soldier, reluctant philosopher
For roughly two decades, the most powerful man on earth — and during most of those years, camped on the Danube frontier fighting Germanic tribes in mud and snow. By candlelight in his tent he kept a private notebook, never meant for anyone else to read, in which he reminded himself, over and over, not to be a vain or angry or self-pitying man.
We call it the Meditations. It survives almost by accident. It is the rarest thing in literature: a real-time diary of someone trying, in earnest, to be good.
why he shows up here
"You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." That is, more or less, the entire premise of this newsletter. (Also, he’s the newsletter logo!)
Iv - THE teacher
Musonius Rufus
c. - 30 - 100 AD - Rome & Gyaros - “The Roman Socrates”
The least famous of the four, and probably the most radical. Twice banished by emperors — once to a waterless rock in the Aegean, where he found a spring and made the island habitable for the other exiles. Argued, in the first century, that women should study philosophy alongside men and that a husband who cheats has wronged his wife exactly as she would have wronged him.
He taught Epictetus, which is to say his ideas reached you whether you have heard his name or not.
why he shows up here
"If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures." A reasonable thing to remember when a planning conversation is harder than it should be.
“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDIDATIONS
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVED
The modern adjective "stoic" — grim, joyless, repressed — is almost the opposite of what these people were after. They laughed. They drank wine in moderation. They loved their families and grieved their dead. What set them apart was a particular discipline: the conviction that a person's only real possession is the use they make of their own mind, and that everything else — health, wealth, reputation, even the people they love — is on loan.
To live well meant treating the loan with gratitude and giving it back, when called, without complaint.
01
The dichotomy of control.
Some things are up to us — our judgments, intentions, actions. The rest is not. Wisdom begins with knowing the difference and refusing to spend grief on the second category.
02
Virtue is the only real good.
Wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control are sufficient for a good life. Money, status, and even health are preferred but not essential. The Stoics were not anti-wealth — several of them had a lot of it — but they wanted to be clear that no amount of it could substitute for being a decent person.
03
Live according to nature.
Humans are reasoning, social creatures. Living well means using reason honestly and acting for the common good — not as sacrifice, but because we are, in their view, parts of one body. If this sounds familiar, it should; a great deal of later Western ethics traces back here.
04
Memento mori.
Hold death in front of you. Not as morbidity, but as the thing that burns away triviality. Knowing the lamp will go out is what makes the present hour worth using well. This is the one I named the newsletter after, and the one I think you, me, and your clients need most.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE WORK
I am not asking you to read the Meditations. (Though if you ever do — and I'd recommend the Gregory Hays translation — you'll find that a Roman emperor at war in the second century had the same anxieties you have on a Tuesday morning, which is either depressing or reassuring depending on the hour.)
What I am suggesting is that the Stoics figured something out that is directly relevant to estate planning conversations: people who genuinely reckon with their mortality make better decisions about everything else. They are less distracted by status games. Less prone to deferring the things that matter. Less likely to mistake the urgent for the important.
The clients you and I both work with are not, by and large, people who lack resources or intelligence. They are people who, like the rest of us, would rather not think about the fact that they will die. The Stoics did not have better answers than we do about the metaphysics of death. What they had — and what we can still borrow — was a willingness to look at it squarely and let the looking change the way they spent the day.
An estate plan is one of the few legal documents that exists entirely because of mortality. Pretending otherwise is what causes the avoidance. Naming it — and quoting a Roman emperor about it, occasionally — is one of the small things this newsletter tries to do.
Doug Harvey
Texas Estate Planning Attorney
The newsletter is where this thinking becomes useful.
Every Tuesday, Estate Planning Attorney Doug Harvey attempts to give his advisor friends concepts explained plainly, things to say to clients, reasons to pick up the phone, and something worth thinking about on the drive home.
— ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
"This is what I'd tell you if we grabbed coffee and you asked me what advisors need to know about estate planning (minus the overpriced coffee)."
Doug Harvey - Estate Planning Attorney
The Blum Firm, PC
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