The Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca once wrote an essay to a woman who was having a hard time getting over the death of her son. 

It’s an interesting essay; he spends nearly 30 pages appealing to cool Stoic reason while at the same time trying to be compassionate. At one point, he tells Marcia (that’s her name), “For, if we were given the choice whether it is preferable to be happy for a short time or never to be happy, it is better for us to have blessings that will depart than to have none at all.” ¹

Then, a few pages later, Seneca tells Marcia this:

“Nothing is so deceptive as the life of a man, nothing is so treacherous: no one, I swear, would have accepted it as a present, if it were not given to us in a state of ignorance. Accordingly, if the greatest fortune is not to be born, the next best, I think, is to die after a short life and be restored to one’s original state.”

So…which is it? In his earnest attempt to show Marcia the “bright side” of dying young like her son did, Seneca appears to contradict himself. Is it better to love and to lose, or better to not have been born at all into this bittersweet, sometimes horrifying world?

It’s easy to say “The former, of course!”, but that minimizes the anguish that so many suffer when they lose a loved one. In some cases, life is no longer bearable for them. We can’t control the fact we’ve been born, but we can choose to minimize heartache by avoiding attachment in the first place.

Does that make this the wisest course?

Love and Fear Go Hand in Hand

Religions and individuals, for millennia, have stepped up to the plate to answer the question, “How do we deal with loss and heartache?” This has given us everything from Buddhism to the Abrahamic religions to absurdism to New Age thinking.

Hannah Arendt, paraphrasing the ancient theologian Saint Augustine, sums up the problem beautifully: “The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not lack of possession but the safety of possession that is at stake.” ²

For me, nothing exemplifies this better than the birth of my daughter. 

Before she existed (it sounds strange saying that now), my life was already happy, already full. If my life was a house and each person or thing I loved was a room, my home was the size of a Tudor estate. Then when my daughter was born, it was as though a whole new wing had been erected overnight. With this sudden influx of joy and happiness came a strange sort of terror.

The evils of the world weighed on my mind more than usual. I had involuntary thoughts every day of someone stealing her, dropping her, or murdering her. With the euphoric feelings of love that surged through me thanks in part to hormones was a feeling almost as strong: a militant resolve to protect her, even if it meant my own death. Each time I ran a thought experiment in which she was gone from my life – even though she’d only entered it days before – I couldn’t imagine how I would go on living. It was one of the most dysphoric things I’d ever experienced. ³

“You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you.”

Saint Augustine and Seneca would both tell me to put my focus on the only thing that I can’t lose – for Augustine that’s God, and for Seneca, it’s Virtue. They would tell me, like many others before and since, that attachment leads to pain. “Love, but be careful what you love,” Augustine warns.  This “what” includes “who”: even people are dangerous to love. Especially people.

They mean well, but what this tells me is that my house should have a single room with a vaulted, 20-foot ceiling and blank white walls. It makes sense intellectually but my soul revolts at the thought. There must be a better way.

How Tragedy Can Be a Good Thing

The ancient Greeks were troubled by the problem of luck and our vulnerability to losing the people we love. Playwrights like Aesychlus explore this over and over in grim, ominous tragedies. Is there a lesson in all these stories about people going mad and having their eyes gouged out, or is it just bleak fatalism?

The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum sees a universal lesson in these tales of death and loss. “Tragedy only happens when you are trying to live well,” she says, as opposed to a “heedless person who doesn’t have a deep commitment to others.”  ⁴

Isn’t it easier, then, to not have deep commitments to other people – or values, or hopes? No, argues Nussbaum, because caring about someone or something enough to be stricken by grief or despair or even madness at losing them is part of what it means to be a good person, to be human. “You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you,” she concludes.

Does this mean that Seneca is advocating we be less than human when he lectures Marcia on just how much mourning is appropriate? Possibly. Mourning is natural, “provided it is done in moderation,” he says. 

He then goes on to use the example of different animals that “recover from” losing their babies after a few hours or days. Maybe he didn’t mean to be as literal as he sounds, but I find his comparison chilling. Humans are not cattle or wild pigs. We carry the memory and the grief of those we lose forever. We never go back to who we were before.

Grief and loss don’t need to be exclusively negative, either. I think what Seneca (and some other Stoics, and Stoic-minded people) miss is that loss has the power to transform us for the better, not just for the worse, or in a neutral way. 

What if we don’t want to be transformed, though? Can’t we maintain a more “predictable” and even-keeled life by avoiding attachment? (I’ve known people to rationalize not owning a dog for this reason – they are afraid of the sorrow they will later experience, knowing they will outlive it). To this, C.S. Lewis offers an argument for love and tragedy in words far more powerful than I could ever summon:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.” ⁵

I hope my daughter will outlive me. I hope that the losses I face won’t be so severe that I will go half-mad, like Hecuba or Oedipus.  We can’t avoid tragedy in this life, but we can choose to embrace it as a part of being a warm-blooded, feeling human. And in the meantime, however fleeting it is, we can choose to love and be loved. 

It is a risk, for sure, but it’s better than damnation. 

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Read Next: What Is the Relationship Between Luck and Happiness? →

1. Seneca, L. A., Davie, J., & Reinhardt, T. (2009). Dialogues and essays. Oxford University Press.
2. Arendt, H., Scott, J. V., & Stark, J. C. (2014). Love and Saint Augustine. The University of Chicago Press.
3. For this reason I find that Seneca can’t help but mansplain just a little bit when he’s trying to comfort Marcia; he is not a mother.
4. In an interview with Bill Moyer here
5. Lewis, C. S. (2017). The Four Loves. HarperOne.