Last year, the writer Chuck Palahniuk received the kind of news that all of us dread. Someone he trusted—the book agent who had represented him for years—had been slowly but steadily robbing him blind. All the millions he’d earned from the royalties of his bestselling books were gone. All the financial security he thought he’d built up was an illusion—undone by the cruel deception and greed of someone close to him.
In July, Palahniuk was asked what it felt like to lose all his money. He stared down at the ground. He was quiet. Then he answered:
“It’s kind of nice. Writing was initially my way of saving money, because if you’re writing, you’re not spending. So it throws me back into writing. There are larger issues in life – the embezzlement is dwarfed by my father-in-law’s death. And there’s the awareness that I’m the person who got me to this place, and I’m still that person, so I can still turn it all back around, and come up with something really strong and vibrant and interesting.”
First off, kudos is due to Palaniuk, because that’s a far more enlightened view than most of us would take of such a betrayal. It could not have been natural or easy to get to that point. The other stages of grief would come before such acceptance: anger, denial, bargaining. But it’s impressive that he got there.
It’s also very Stoic. Seneca spoke often of the reversals that life has in store for us—no matter how successful or secure we might believe that we are. “No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune,” he wrote, “that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.” Which is why we have to make sure that our identity and our happiness is not tied up in physical or financial things—because these things are not in our control. Seneca’s advice was that we ought to “possess nothing that can be snatched from us to the great profit of a plotting foe.”
Chuck Palahniuk’s money was stolen. That kind of theft is always a possibility since money is never really “ours” to begin with. It’s just a number in our bank account. It’s something on loan to us until we spend it or until it’s rendered worthless by some government institution we don’t control. But our confidence—that sense that we’re the person who earned it in the first place, the person who has worked hard and sacrificed and created—that’s 100% ours. No one can take that from us. Fortune can take our jobs, unfairly tarnish our good name, or burn down our house.
Can it change who we are? Our sense of ourselves? Only if we let it.
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The Daily Stoic