Seneca (in the time of Nero in Rome) believed that living a moral life did not consist of rejecting the world, but of doing away with the fear that motivates our frenetic consumption: the fear of poverty. In a letter every culture jammer should read On Festivals and Fasting, Seneca counsels a friend that the path to inner peace is to adopt a ritual of practiced poverty:

“appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing. Start cultivating a relationship with poverty. For no one is worthy of god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing”.

In this way, Seneca hoped that the fear of becoming poor in the future would be banished and that the self would be liberated in the present to live a more genuine life.