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Seneca to Lucilius, 28: traveling won’t cure your inner problems
“Are you amazed to find that even with such extensive travel, to so many varied locales, you have not managed to shake off gloom and heaviness from your mind? As if that were a new experience! You must change the mind, not the venue.” (XXVIII.1)
Seneca begins this way his 28th letter to his friend Lucilius, part of an amazing collection that, in essence, constitutes an informal curriculum in the study of Stoic philosophy. I don’t know about you, but I found myself, and I’ve known plenty of people who have been at one point or another, in the same exact situation, making the same common misdiagnosis of what was going on.
Seneca is not arguing against traveling, either as a learning experience or simply for leisure. He did quite a bit of that in his own life time. He is, rather, arguing against traveling as a way to escape our problems. Sure, some rest may be helpful, as we take our minds off our immediate situation. But if the issue is internal — if we are unhappy because of our own attitude toward things — than looking elsewhere for solutions is a palliative at best, and distracting and counterproductive at worst.
