Nothing Serious
I was lost in thought, struck by the magnificence of the view: the Acropolis lit up at night. A slight breeze made the outdoor seating cooler than it should have been. I was in Athens, sitting close to where philosophy was born.
I was with my wife and two other couples, friends of hers, when one of them asked me whether I was writing anything new.
“Not really. I’m writing my weekly newsletter, but nothing serious,” I said.
I’ve written three books and close to a thousand articles, and yet I still describe my writing as nothing serious.
I quickly changed the subject, deciding that this group wouldn’t be interested in my writing. They were typical of my affluent social circle, who want to discuss money, best restaurants, beautiful places and politics.
I don’t really know how they would’ve reacted if I’d explained my 2024 memoir, the upcoming idea for my new book, and how seriously I take the newsletter.
I’m not sure why, but I always shy away from talking about my writing with friends outside the writing world.
Perhaps it’s because I always feel like an imposter. I come from a world about as far from the intellectual one as you can get. I don’t think my writing is good enough. Even my family’s compliments feel like kindness rather than real interest. The fact that I don’t have many readers proves it, or so I tell myself.
Or maybe it’s because I always find myself within a superficial crowd who value top restaurants, beach bars and the latest fads, a consumerist world I want to escape. Not the sort of group I could argue with about Nietzsche.
When I spent a week in Vermont for my MFA residency, I found myself in the midst of the bookish crowd I craved. And here too, I felt like an imposter. I couldn’t share my writing aspirations, as they all seemed far more literary than me, so I told them I was more of a self-help coach wanting to hone my writing skills.
Even stranger, I didn’t share that I own my own company and that it was successful, for fear they’d judge me as someone using writing as a pride project: the typical hubristic CEO writing a book about his own success. Which wasn’t me.
Why do I have a dichotomy in my mind that says I could either be a writer who is a perfect human, always authentic to himself and his values, which include depth, meaning and no right to luxury; or a successful businessperson who is privileged, shallow, and whose values have been corrupted by capitalism and consumerism.
The environment changed, and yet I still couldn’t tell the truth. It’s really not about being a writer or a successful businessman. It’s me.
Reading Seneca the Younger has helped me understand the hypocrisy that I am mired in. Seneca was a leading Stoic philosopher, statesman and tutor to Emperor Nero. Though he wrote about the perils of wealth and why we don’t need any of it to be happy, he amassed great riches.
In Letter 5 to Lucilius, Seneca says, “The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn; and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow-men? Inwardly, we ought to be different in all respects, but our exterior should conform to society.”
Sometimes I feel the damning, judgemental eyes and thoughts of my fellow-men and want to avoid the scorn, so I conform, knowing that internally I think differently.
I’m still stung by an incident a few years ago, when I overheard a friend mock my writing and the energy he thought I wasted on it.
However, my silence is probably cowardice.
Shouldn’t I know better since I’ve been doing this writing business for over 15 years now?
Later in the same letter, Seneca says, “our life should observe a happy medium between the ways of a sage and the ways of the world at large.”
He’s telling me that there is no need for this dichotomy that I’ve created in my head. I can be both a writer and a successful entrepreneur who enjoys the trappings of a good life, but not overly attached to them.
Bukowski wrote poetry from the depths of poverty and despair, while Montaigne invented the essay form and wrote some of the best ones while wealthy and shut away in a tower on his estate.
This fantasy that all writers must be virtuous, unpoisoned by the chalice of riches, is one I invented to support my imposter feeling.
In De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life), a dialogue addressed to his brother Gallio, Seneca writes of the wise man and his riches: “he will neither brag of them nor hide them away: the one is the part of a silly, the other of a cowardly and paltry spirit, which, as it were, muffles up a good thing in its lap.”
Whether I’m in a chic restaurant in Athens or in Vermont with fellow MFA writers, it is cowardly not to speak of both my love for writing and the success of my company.
In the same dialogue, Seneca says, “I speak of virtue, not of myself, and when I blame vices, I blame my own first of all.”
Near the end of his life, Seneca asked Emperor Nero to release him from his duties, offering to return everything he earned and owned. Nero refused.
Three years later, Nero ordered him to kill himself.