Seneca inverts our usual arithmetic of poverty—it's not about what you lack, but what you obsess over lacking. The brutal flip here is that satisfaction itself becomes a choice, one that has nothing to do with your bank account. A surgeon earning six figures who mentally catalogs everything she doesn't own suffers a deprivation that a schoolteacher with half her salary simply doesn't experience, because the teacher has made peace with *enough*. What Seneca understood is that desperation is entirely internal, which means it's also entirely within our power to refuse.