"The ancient Romans and Greeks made no distinction between philosophy, therapy and self-help. “Philosophy’s power to blunt the blows of circumstance is beyond belief,” observed Seneca the Stoic; the very aim of philosophy, he argued, was “the state of happiness”. Today, with philosophers confined to academia, we’ve come to think of therapy as being for troubled people and self-help for slightly flaky people - as if minimising sad emotions and maximising happy ones wasn’t the most universal of all challenges. It’s hard to imagine what Seneca might have felt about a world in which philosophers don’t seek happiness, and those seeking happiness read Deepak Chopra. Or, rather, it isn’t: he’d have been stoical about it, one assumes. But you take my point."