He owned almost nothing: a cloak, a bag, a staff and a cup to drink from. One day he saw a child at a spring scooping up water with cupped hands. He took the cup out of his bag, looked at it and threw it away, remarking that a child had beaten him in plainness of living. Shortly afterwards he saw a boy eating his lentils out of a hollowed crust of bread, and threw away his bowl as well. What he had until then considered the minimum turned out to be merely the least he had thought of so far.
Diogenes lived in the fourth century BC and treated poverty not as a misfortune but as an exercise: he wanted to test how little a person needs in order to be independent. His method was demonstrative, often shocking to the Athenians, and deliberately public. The Stoics did not adopt his radicalism; they called possessions an indifferent, something you may have as long as you do not need it. But the question Diogenes posed remained, and Seneca posed it again when, as one of the wealthiest men in the empire, he spent a few days a month sleeping on straw and drinking water.
You have already decided what you minimally need. Then someone shows you, without thinking about it, that it can be less.
That the child was there and that he saw it did not lie with him. What he did with it did. And note the direction: he did not have to acquire anything to feel richer, he let something go. Every object you put down is one less that can break, be stolen, or come to own you.
What have you bought because you thought you needed it, and would you buy it again today?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions