Seneca and his stoicism have gained a lot of popularity in the past couple of years. What exactly is stoicism? It is a kind of detachment from and acceptance of the vicissitudes of life. Seneca was born in Rome, and he was a philosopher, author, and counselor who lived around 2000 years ago. He came up with ideas that are still helpful to people today when it comes to dealing with life’s ups and downs.He was called Seneca the Younger and was born as Lucius Annaeus Seneca, born in Corduba, Spain, around 4 BCE to a rich family. Seneca’s father taught rhetoric, and he went to school in Rome to learn grammar, public speaking, and philosophy. He had health problems early on, like asthma and bronchitis, which made him turn to Stoicism as a way to deal with them. He had a successful career in Roman politics. Under Emperor Caligula, Seneca was elected senator and quaestor. In 41 CE, Emperor Claudius sent him to Corsica for eight years because he falsely accused him of having an affair with Julia Livilla, Claudius’s niece. Seneca wrote some of his first works there, such as tragedies and consolations. He came back in 49 CE because Agrippina made him tutor her son Nero.Seneca was one of Nero’s advisors when he became emperor in 54 CE. Burrus, the prefect of the guard, was also one of his advisors. At first, they did a good job of leading Rome by bringing about reforms and peace. But Nero became cruel, and Seneca tried to quit around 62 CE. Nero told him to kill himself in 65 CE because of a fake plot. Seneca calmly drank poison, then cut his veins open. When the poison was slow, he used steam to speed it up. He died with honor, staying true to his beliefs. Seneca was a Stoic, which is a school of thought that began in Greece around 300 BCE with Zeno of Citium. Stoics thought that the only real good things were virtue, wisdom, courage, justice, and moderation. Wealth, health, and fame are all “indifferent” because we can’t fully control them. Happiness comes from within, by concentrating on what we can control: our thoughts, decisions, and responses.Seneca made Stoicism useful for regular Romans. He wrote essays like “On the Shortness of Life” in which he said that time is our most valuable resource and that we shouldn’t waste it on worries or trivial things. “On Anger” teaches us to use reason to control our anger because anger hurts us more than it hurts others. He talked about the “dichotomy of control,” which means that you should accept what happens to you on the outside but take charge of your own thoughts and feelings. Seneca was honest about his flaws, which is different from pure theorists. He was wealthy and powerful, but he wrote about living simply and helping others, like treating slaves like people. His 124 “Letters to Lucilius” are like advice columns that give short, direct lessons on friendship, death, and morality. He thought of philosophy as a way to heal the mind, not as a set of ideas.Seneca’s thoughts are a perfect fit for our crazy world. People want peace in their busy lifestyles, economic stress, too much social media, and global uncertainty. He is right to focus on time: we scroll through things all the time but feel rushed. Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday, for example, use Seneca’s ideas in books like “The Daily Stoic” to help people be more productive and mentally healthy. Contemporary therapy reflects him. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) uses Stoic tools to change the way you think and lower your anxiety. Seneca pretty much came up with that way of thinking. CEOs read him to learn how to deal with stress, and athletes read him to learn how to be tough. His line “We suffer more in imagination than in reality” went viral during COVID.One of the most famous lines of Seneca is, “But when you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.” These lines taken from A Stoic throw a profound light on the philosophy of friendship. Seneca says that a true friendship is the one where you trust the other person as much as you trust yourself. A half-baked trust towards someone you think of as a friend cannot forge a true friendship. Trust in this relationship has to be deep and complete. Trust should be the foremost parameter of judging a friend. Anyone who fails on this is not worthy of being called a friend. These lines serve as great lesson in choosing the right kind of friend in one’s life, a guide to lasting friendships.