No one is safe

A socratic maxim has it "no harm can come to a good man."

Not without reason, "external goods" were known also to the ancients as "goods of fortune."

Not just wealth but family and friends could be taken in a moment.

The same is all too obviously true for physical health, as well.

The last bastion of happiness lay in goods supposedly beyond the reach of fortune.

In "internal goods," in virtue, alone considered truly good and alone valued by the sage.

But there is Alzheimer's and Mad Cow and so much else.

Nothing is beyond the reach of fortune, nothing worth having cannot be lost except in death.

Happiness cannot be protected by its deliberate abandonment, and even its most minimal or apparently secure elements are not safe.

And, anyway, humans are not built to be happy alone, or with only transient or superficial relationships.

Too, think of the virtues whose exercise requires close relationships with others.

Or the possession of those very external goods so exposed to and so menaced by fortune's malice.

PS.

Bismark made a joke, once.

Something about the folly of committing suicide out of fear of death.

Just so is the rejection of external goods, or in any case of attachment to them, recommended by stoicism only for fear of their being taken away.