Seneca was one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome. He possessed immense wealth, political influence and every luxury the empire could offer. Yet from time to time, he deliberately slept on the floor, wore coarse clothing, and lived on the cheapest food he could find. It wasn’t because he had lost his fortune. It was because he didn’t want his fortune to own him.

The Stoic philosopher understood something that modern societies seem to have forgotten: comfort is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. As he famously observed, ‘The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.’

Imagine proposing that in Australia today.

We have built an entire culture around the elimination of discomfort. Governments promise to shield us from hardship. Schools strive to protect children from failure. Universities increasingly protect students from ideas that might offend them. Workplaces promise psychological safety. Parents remove obstacles from their children’s paths long before they have the opportunity to overcome them themselves. Every inconvenience has become a problem to be solved. Every setback has become someone else’s responsibility. Every hardship is treated as evidence that the system has somehow failed.

Yet something curious has happened. As life has become materially easier, Australians do not appear to have become more resilient. Quite the opposite. We seem more anxious, more divided and less confident than previous generations who endured far greater hardship than most of us could imagine.

It raises an uncomfortable question: What if the absence of struggle is itself part of the problem?

The Stoics believed that character was not inherited but forged. Courage, discipline, patience and resilience could not be taught in a lecture theatre or downloaded from a government website. They were developed in much the same way a muscle is developed: through resistance. Without resistance there is no growth. Without friction there is no polish.

Modern Australia often seems to believe the opposite. We have become remarkably adept at insulating ourselves from difficulty while simultaneously wondering why resilience appears to be in decline. We encourage children to avoid failure rather than learn from it. We increasingly judge ideas not by whether they are true but by whether they make people uncomfortable. We promise that governments can eliminate risk from almost every aspect of life, despite history demonstrating that uncertainty is simply part of the human condition.

In doing so, we may be solving today’s discomfort while quietly creating tomorrow’s weakness.

None of this is an argument against prosperity. Wealth is one of civilisation’s greatest achievements. Modern medicine, technological innovation and rising living standards have spared humanity suffering on a scale our ancestors could scarcely imagine. Nor is this an argument for unnecessary hardship. It is an argument against believing that comfort alone produces strong people.

History suggests precisely the opposite.

The generations that built Australia endured world wars, economic depression, droughts, floods, bushfires, isolation, and extraordinary uncertainty. They were not remarkable because hardship automatically produces virtue – many people are broken by adversity. But those generations understood something we increasingly struggle to accept: meaningful lives require responsibility, sacrifice, and perseverance. They did not expect life to be comfortable all the time. They expected it to be worthwhile.

There is an important difference.

Perhaps that explains why so much of our political debate now revolves around protection rather than possibility. Governments promise to remove obstacles rather than build capability. Public policy increasingly asks what citizens are entitled to receive rather than what they are capable of becoming. Even our language has changed. We speak less about resilience and more about vulnerability; less about character and more about comfort.

The result is a subtle but profound shift in national character. A society that constantly seeks comfort eventually begins to fear discomfort. A society that fears discomfort eventually begins to avoid challenge. And a society that avoids challenge gradually loses the confidence that made it successful in the first place.

That is the real danger. Not that Australians have become wealthy. Not that our lives have become easier. But that somewhere along the way we began to mistake comfort for strength.

Seneca would probably have smiled at the irony. The man who could afford every luxury in Rome deliberately chose discomfort because he understood that resilience cannot be purchased. It must be practised.

Australia would do well to remember the same lesson.

The goal of civilisation is not to remove every trial from life. It’s to produce citizens capable of meeting them.