"Set aside a certain number of days," Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius, "during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?'" His reasoning was simple: "If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes" (Letter 18.5-6, Richard Gummere's translation).
Childhoods have changed in at least one measurable way. Among seven- and eight-year-olds surveyed in five areas of England, 80 percent were allowed to go to school without an adult in 1971. By 1990, the figure was 9 percent (Hillman, Adams and Whitelegg, One False Move). That study measured how much freedom children were given, not how patient or resilient they became. Still, the long, unsupervised afternoons many people remember are a useful way into Seneca's advice. Linking the two is an analogy, not a research finding. Here are seven mental strengths worth practicing today, whatever decade you grew up in.
1. Sitting with boredom
Seneca described a restless kind of person who keeps changing scenery to escape a feeling of dissatisfaction. "Now let us make for Campania," this person says, then grows tired of it and heads somewhere else. Seneca quotes the poet Lucretius: "Thus every mortal from himself doth flee." But it doesn't work, he adds, because such a person "follows himself and weighs himself down by his own most burdensome companionship" (Of Tranquillity of Mind 2, Aubrey Stewart's translation).
Modern research suggests that many people find their own company surprisingly hard. In a 2014 study, Timothy Wilson and colleagues asked participants to sit alone with their thoughts for up to 15 minutes. Many found it unpleasant. In one experiment, 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women gave themselves at least one mild electric shock during the thinking period, even though they had earlier said they would pay to avoid being shocked again (Science). The study didn't compare generations. But it suggests that sitting with your own thoughts is a skill many people find hard.
