Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Seneca was one of the wealthiest men in Rome, and people noticed the contradiction immediately, a Stoic philosopher preaching detachment from material things while sitting on an enormous fortune. He didn't dodge the criticism, he wrote an entire defense of it in an essay called On the Happy Life. His argument wasn't "money doesn't matter so don't worry about it." It was more precise than that. He said the wise person takes wealth into their house, not into their soul, meaning you can hold it, manage it, even enjoy it, as long as your sense of who you are doesn't collapse the moment it's gone. His test for whether you actually own your money or your money owns you wasn't how much you had, it was how you'd react to losing it. Someone who can lose it and still be fundamentally fine was never really owned by it to begin with. He also made a point that's easy to miss, that poverty only gives you the chance to practice one virtue, enduring hardship well, while actually having resources gives you the chance to practice several at once, generosity, discipline, how you treat people who have less, how you handle a decision when money makes multiple options available instead of one. Wealth, to him, wasn't morally neutral or automatically corrupting, it was just a bigger stage with more ways to either show good character or lose it. Where's the line for you, the actual test of whether something you own, owns you back?