As for me, I would choose being sick over living in luxury, for being sick only harms the body, whereas luxury destroys both the body and the soul, causing weakness and incapacity in the body, and lack of control and cowardice in the soul. What’s more, luxury breeds injustice because it also breeds greediness.
—Musonius Rufus, Lectures, 20.95.14-17
Stories about lottery winners tend to share one lesson: suddenly coming into a great deal of money is a curse, not a blessing. Just a few years after they get their big check, many lottery winners are actually in worse financial shape. They’ve lost friends, they’ve gotten divorced. Their whole lives have been turned into a nightmare as a result of their obscenely good fortune.
It’s like that Metallica lyric (fittingly from a song called “No Leaf Clover”): “Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel / Is just a freight train coming your way.”
And yet the most common response from a cancer survivor, the person who went through the thing we all dread and fear? “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Funny how that works out, isn’t it?
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman