According to Seneca, we let materialistic items waste our own time, compromise our happiness in the present for a time of leisure in the future that may never come, and we struggle to fill what leisure time we do have between events, activities, or commitments with the equivalent of wasteful distraction. That we should live a life that is stress-free and to keep life from getting busy with useless things. Also including a critical point that it is not a selfish act to shield ourselves from people who waste our time without giving us anything. It just points to a truth that we don’t want to admit sometimes. Seneca provides us with this when she compares a poor man between a rich man. An example of distraction from tranquility that leads to stress instead of inner peace. The statement followed: For if you compare all the other things from which we suffer, deaths, illnesses, fears, desires, endurance of …show more content…
That we live too much for others rather than ourselves. That we at least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves. To let us now call in our thoughts, intentions to ourselves, and to discover one’s self. What Montaigne has in mind isn’t so much what we think of as solitude as in being alone, but rather being comfortable with one’s self in a state of retirement. He describes solitude as a “room at the back of the shop. Keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principle solitude and asylum” that “within it, our normal conversation should be ourselves, with ourselves, so privy that no commerce or communication with the outside world should find a place there. There we should laugh as if we had no wife, no children, no possessions, no followers, and no menservants.” (Screech 100). Which provides a sense of solitude for in case we have to go through it, we can be used to those things that we never actually