Almost everything worth working toward requires us to repeat the same small actions for longer than we’d like. One session at the gym rarely changes anything you can see, and a few pages are a long way from a finished book. You have to keep showing up through weeks when the results are difficult to notice, often without knowing exactly when all that effort will begin to pay off.

Missing a day here and there isn’t much of a problem. But when starting and stopping becomes a recurring pattern, it can begin to affect the confidence you have in yourself. You get excited, make a plan, follow it for a while, and eventually stop. The next time you feel inspired to make a change, there’s a part of you that remembers how the previous attempts ended. You want to believe this time will be different, but you’re no longer quite so sure. It’s tempting to conclude that you simply lack discipline. Perhaps you tell yourself that you need to be stricter or make a more serious commitment next time. But I wonder whether we’re sometimes making the problem worse by approaching it that way. We respond to a broken promise by making an even bigger one, when we haven’t really understood why the first one became so difficult to keep.

I’d like to help you break that cycle. There are ways to make commitments that hold up when life gets difficult, and to recover from a missed day without feeling as though you’ve lost everything you’ve worked toward. More importantly, I want you to experience the confidence that comes from knowing you can rely on yourself, even when you’re tired, distracted, or no longer feeling motivated.

Continue reading to discover how to keep your commitments, build trust in yourself, and stay consistent even when motivation fades.

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It’s easy enough to remain composed when someone is being reasonable with you. What impresses me is someone who can face a deliberate insult, recognize exactly what’s happening, and still have the presence of mind to respond on their own terms. Most of us know how quickly an argument can get out of hand, and how frustrating it feels to look back and realize we let our emotions get the better of us.

I’ve never liked the idea that staying calm means quietly accepting bad treatment. Sometimes a remark deserves to be challenged, or someone needs to be told they’ve crossed a line.

I’d like you to be able to do that with confidence, without feeling that you have to become angry to be taken seriously. Even if the other person never admits they were wrong, you should be able to walk away knowing you said what mattered and handled yourself in a way you respect.

Cato the Younger was in the middle of pleading a case when Lentulus decided to make a spectacle of him. He gathered as much spit as he could in his mouth and spat it straight onto Cato’s forehead. It was a disgusting act of humiliation, carried out in front of the very people Cato had been addressing. And there he stood, with another man’s spit on his face.

But Cato simply wiped his face and spoke.

“If anyone says you have no cheek, Lentulus, I'll tell him he's mistaken.”

It was a clever play on words, mocking both Lentulus’ mouth and his shameless behavior.

Seneca preserved the story in On Anger, and I can understand why. Lentulus had gone to extraordinary lengths to humiliate Cato, yet Cato responded with one dry remark that made the insult reflect rather poorly on the man who delivered it.

It’s interesting how little Cato seemed to need from Lentulus. He didn’t attempt to convince the man that he deserved respect, and he had no interest in matching his behavior. He answered the insult in his own way, leaving Lentulus responsible for the disgraceful thing he’d done. That’s a difficult kind of composure to develop. When someone deliberately provokes us, we often feel an immediate obligation to defend ourselves. We want them to understand that they’ve misjudged us, even when it becomes obvious that they have no intention of changing their mind.

Epictetus offered a useful perspective on this in Enchiridion. When someone treats you badly or speaks badly of you, he explained, they’re acting according to their own understanding of the situation. They can only act on what seems right to them, even when their judgment is mistaken.

He suggested remembering a simple phrase when someone speaks against you:

“It seemed so to him.”

Someone may genuinely believe you’re incompetent, selfish, or deserving of criticism. You can recognize that this is their opinion without immediately feeling compelled to correct it. They may have misunderstood you, or they may know something about you that you haven’t considered. Either way, you can decide how much attention their judgment deserves before choosing what to do about it.

The difficulty is that we don’t experience everyone’s judgment in the same way. A stranger’s criticism may mean very little, while the same words from someone we admire can leave us questioning ourselves for days. I’ve found it useful to think of this as a kind of loan. We allow other people to hold pieces of our self-respect, often without realizing we’ve done it. Their approval makes us feel more confident, and when they withdraw it, we become anxious to win it back. But their approval was never something we could guarantee. We can behave well and give people every reason to think highly of us, yet they may still come to an unfavorable conclusion.

That doesn’t mean we should stop caring about other people’s opinions. A close friend may recognize a fault we’ve overlooked, and someone who understands our work may offer criticism that helps us improve.

In fact, some of the hardest provocations to handle are the ones that contain a little truth.

Suppose you’ve made a careless mistake at work and a colleague criticizes you in front of everyone. Perhaps they do it deliberately to embarrass you. You immediately feel defensive, even though you know that part of their criticism is accurate.

Epictetus had a rather amusing observation about our faults. In another passage of the Enchiridion, he advises that if someone reports to you that another person has been speaking badly of you, you can reply that the person must not have known about your other faults, or they would have mentioned those too.

It’s a useful reminder that we all have faults. If the criticism is true, we can learn from it, even when the person delivering it wants to embarrass us. We may need to correct a mistake or apologize, and we can do so while objecting to the way we were treated. Admitting you’re wrong about something doesn’t give another person permission to treat you however they like.

False accusations require a different judgment. Sometimes correcting them matters, especially when they could affect your reputation or relationships. But a reasonable attempt to clarify the facts can turn into a struggle to make someone respect you.

Before responding, ask yourself what you actually want to accomplish. Is there something important to correct? Has someone crossed a boundary? Or do you mainly want them to admit they were wrong about you?

Of course, asking yourself those questions is considerably harder when you’re already upset. Seneca understood that our first reaction to an insult isn’t always something we can prevent. In On Anger, he described the sudden physical responses that can occur when we’re shocked or offended. Our face grows warm, our heart beats faster, and we feel an immediate surge of irritation before we’ve had much opportunity to think. He distinguished these involuntary reactions from the anger that develops when we accept the judgment that we’ve been wronged and ought to retaliate.

That’s a useful distinction when you’re the one being provoked. You may not be able to prevent that first surge of irritation, but you can give yourself a chance to regain your composure before responding. I know that’s easier said than done when someone has just insulted you, especially when other people are listening. You may feel an enormous urge to answer immediately, almost as though taking a few seconds to think would make you look weak.

But those few seconds can be the difference between saying something useful and saying something you’ll regret.

I’ve always respected people who can give a precise, well-considered answer in the middle of a heated conversation. You can tell they’re listening to what’s being said rather than desperately searching for something to fire back with. They don’t need to raise their voice to make themselves heard, and when they do respond, their words carry more weight because they’ve taken the time to choose them carefully.

I’d like you to become better at that, and a good place to begin is by learning how you personally react under pressure.

Some people become defensive and start talking faster. Others turn sarcastic, raise their voice, or struggle to find anything to say until the conversation is over. You probably have tendencies of your own, and recognizing them gives you an opportunity to respond differently.

If you tend to interrupt, practice letting the other person finish. If your mind goes blank, give yourself permission to pause before answering. And if you immediately begin defending yourself against every accusation, try identifying the one point that actually needs addressing. You can also ask the other person to explain what they mean, especially if their criticism is vague or unnecessarily personal. You don’t need a brilliant comeback when a simple, thoughtful response will do.

Many people go through the same arguments over and over without ever examining how they react. If you’re willing to recognize your own tendencies and work on them, you already have an advantage over someone who simply reacts on instinct. With practice, you’ll begin noticing the warning signs earlier, giving yourself more opportunity to choose how you respond.

And sometimes, once you’ve considered what’s been said, you may decide that the remark doesn’t deserve a response at all. Silence can feel uncomfortable when you’re worried that other people will interpret it as weakness. But you don’t owe everyone an argument about your character, and refusing to participate in a pointless exchange doesn’t mean you’ve agreed with what was said.

There will also be situations where you need to establish a clear boundary.

Suppose someone repeatedly makes personal remarks during a disagreement. You’ve tried to explain your position, but they keep returning to insults instead of addressing what you’re saying.

You might tell them:

“If you keep speaking to me like that, I’m going to end this conversation.”

There’s no need to raise your voice. You’re explaining what you’re willing to participate in and what you’ll do if the situation continues.

The important part is following through. If you announce that you’re leaving and then spend another twenty minutes arguing about why the other person should respect your boundary, you’ve allowed yourself to get drawn back into the exchange. Sometimes the most reasonable thing you can do is end the conversation.

We should also be careful about assuming that every unpleasant remark was intended to provoke us. People sometimes express legitimate frustrations in ways that are unfair or unnecessarily hurtful. A friend who accuses you of never listening to them might actually be upset about a particular conversation in which they felt ignored. You could spend the next ten minutes arguing about the word never. But if you listen for the frustration behind the accusation, you may discover something you’ve genuinely overlooked. You can take that concern seriously while still making it clear that you don’t appreciate being spoken to unfairly.

I wrote about a related idea in Don’t Take It Personally. We often interpret people’s behavior as though it reflects a carefully considered judgment of who we are, when much of the time they’re responding to frustrations we know very little about.

But even when you handle a difficult conversation well, there’s still the question of what happens afterward.

I suspect many of us have spent far more time being angry about a remark than the person who made it ever spent thinking about it. Something that lasted ten seconds can occupy our thoughts for the rest of the afternoon. The strange thing is that we’re often continuing an argument with our own impression of what the other person thinks of us. They’re no longer there to respond, and we can imagine them being as unreasonable as we like.

Every round you win in your head is won against an opponent who cannot concede, and the anger refreshes itself each time.

Sometimes we keep replaying the exchange because we never got a satisfactory ending. We wish we’d answered differently, or we want to imagine the moment when the other person finally admits they were wrong. But even the perfect imaginary response cannot change what happened.

If there’s something left to resolve, we can address it when we’ve had time to calm down. If there isn’t, continuing the argument won’t bring us any closer to an apology or an understanding that the other person may never offer.

Sometimes we’re still arguing because we want someone to return a piece of the self-respect we’ve placed in their hands. But winning an imaginary argument won’t make them see us the way we’d like.

I’d encourage you to pay attention to the remarks that affect you more than you expect. Certain subjects may make you unusually defensive, or criticism from particular people may stay with you longer than you would like. Those reactions can tell you where you’ve been allowing other people’s judgments more influence than they deserve.

After a difficult exchange, take a moment to consider how you handled yourself. Did you respond too quickly? Was there something you could have expressed more clearly? Maybe you noticed yourself preparing a response before the other person had even finished speaking. Those observations give you something specific to work on the next time you’re in a similar situation.

You won’t handle every provocation perfectly, and I wouldn’t expect you to. There will still be moments when someone catches you off guard and you respond more sharply than you’d like. You can acknowledge those mistakes and learn from them without turning them into another reason to criticize yourself.

Cato wiped his face and spoke as himself. Someone can provoke you whenever they like, and what they get back is yours to decide.

Stay stoic,

SW

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It’s a question philosophers have spent thousands of years trying to answer, and one I keep coming back to in my own writing. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that we need to regularly examine the decisions we’re making and the people we’re becoming.

Our priorities can change considerably over the years, even when our plans remain much the same. You may still be working toward something you decided was important at twenty, despite having learned a great deal about yourself and what you want from life since then.

Maybe you still want it. Good. Then you should know why.

If your priorities have changed, that’s worth discovering before you dedicate another five years to it.

With another year coming to an end, many of us will soon be thinking about what we’ve accomplished and what we want to do next. I think that’s worth doing, but there’s much more to examine than our achievements. Have we become more patient with the people around us? Have we been there for those who needed us? Perhaps you’ve handled a difficult year with more courage than you would have thought yourself capable of, or accomplished everything you set out to do while neglecting something that matters far more to you. Those things deserve our attention too.

One of the things I appreciate most about Stoicism is how seriously it takes the examination of our own lives. The Stoics encouraged people to question their judgments and take responsibility for how they lived. I’ve chosen these five questions in that spirit, and I hope they’ll help you look more closely at things you’ve grown accustomed to taking for granted.

1. What do I actually want?

The longer you’ve been pursuing a goal, the harder it can become to imagine giving it up. You’ve made sacrifices for it. Other people know it’s what you’re working toward. It may even have become part of how you introduce yourself. After enough years, the time you’ve invested begins to feel like a reason to continue, although it tells you very little about whether the next few years would be well spent.

And I understand why that happens. Walking away from something you’ve worked toward for years can feel like admitting that all the effort was wasted. It’s an uncomfortable possibility, especially when the goal once meant a great deal to you. But our priorities change as we get older, and something that made perfect sense at twenty may no longer deserve the same place in our lives at thirty.

There’s also the question of what we’re expecting the achievement itself to give us. A promotion might offer greater responsibility and better pay, both of which could improve your life. But perhaps you’re also hoping that reaching a certain position will finally quiet the feeling that you haven’t accomplished enough.

Seneca described people who crossed seas hoping to escape their dissatisfaction, only to discover that the same troubled mind had accompanied them. They had changed their surroundings, sometimes quite dramatically, without finding the relief they’d expected. I suspect many of us have experienced a smaller version of this after accomplishing something we once wanted badly. The achievement feels wonderful for a while, and we’re proud of what we’ve done. Then ordinary life returns, along with some of the concerns we imagined success would leave behind.

That doesn’t make the achievement meaningless. Financial security can relieve worries that have followed you for years, and finally becoming good at something you’ve struggled with can change what you believe you’re capable of. Those are meaningful improvements. But the satisfaction of reaching a goal may be more temporary than we expect, especially when we’ve attached hopes to it that have little to do with the achievement itself.

I also wish we paid more attention to the life we’ll have to lead while pursuing our ambitions. We can become so attached to the idea of reaching a destination that we barely consider what getting there will require. You might love the thought of becoming fluent in another language, but feel considerably less enthusiastic about the evenings you’ll need to spend practicing. Perhaps you want to become healthier, or develop the discipline to follow through on things you’ve struggled with for years. Those are worthwhile ambitions, but they’ll ask something of you long before you have much progress to show for your efforts. And if we’re going to dedicate years of our lives to something, I think the way we spend those years deserves just as much consideration as what we hope to achieve at the end.

There will always be sacrifices involved in pursuing something meaningful. Some are well worth making, and the difficulty of an ambition isn’t necessarily a reason to abandon it. What matters is understanding what we’re giving up and whether the result still deserves that investment. The years you’ve already spent working toward something cannot answer that question for you.

Take one ambition that occupies a substantial part of your life and examine what you’re expecting from it. Can it realistically give you what you’re hoping for? Are you willing to live the life required to achieve it, knowing what you know today?

You might find that you still want it just as much as ever. I would consider that a good outcome, especially if you’ve arrived at it through genuine reflection. But if your reasons have changed, you should be willing to acknowledge that too. The next years of your life deserve their own justification.

2. What can I actually control?

One of the most familiar teachings in Stoicism is that some things are within our control while others are not. Epictetus placed this distinction at the very beginning of the Enchiridion, and much of his philosophy follows from learning to recognize the difference.

It’s a simple principle to understand, although applying it to ordinary life can be considerably more difficult.

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Seneca once wrote about a woman named Harpaste who lived in his household. She had suddenly lost her sight, but according to Seneca, she had no idea it had happened. She kept asking her attendant to move her to another room because the one she was in was too dark. Wherever she went, she encountered the same problem, and each time she assumed there was something wrong with the room.

Seneca wasn’t particularly kind in the way he described her, but he soon turned the attention toward himself and his reader. He observed that we often behave in much the same way. We blame our circumstances for problems that follow us wherever we go. We convince ourselves that our difficulties come from where we live, the people around us, or the demands of our work, without considering whether something in our own behavior might be contributing to them.

Of course, sometimes our circumstances really are the problem. But when the same difficulties keep returning, even as our circumstances change, it’s worth asking what we might be bringing with us.

For years, I told myself I worked best under pressure. And to be fair, I often did. I got through my assignments and exams by leaving things until the last minute, so I saw little reason to change. Then several deadlines came at once, and suddenly the approach I’d relied on was putting my studies at risk. I’ve been making an effort to start earlier ever since, and it’s something I still work on. I still work well under pressure, but I’ve realized that’s a poor reason to keep creating it.

Looking back, it’s strange how little I questioned the habit. I had an explanation that made sense to me, and for a long time, that was enough.

I wonder whether there’s something in your own life you’ve accepted in much the same way. A habit you’ve come to consider part of your personality, or a problem you’ve explained so many times that you no longer think to question the explanation itself.

And that creates a difficult problem. If the explanations we give ourselves are sometimes part of what keeps a habit alive, how can we trust those same explanations to help us understand it?

Seneca explored that difficulty through another image, this time involving sleep and dreams. I think it offers a useful way to understand why some of our deepest patterns remain hidden, even when we sincerely want to know ourselves better.

Continue reading to discover how to recognize the hidden patterns shaping your life and understand yourself better.

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Think of something you’ve been meaning to learn. Maybe you’ve even looked at classes or watched a few videos, enough to imagine yourself being good at it. Now imagine the first lesson, when you still have to ask where to stand and what to do. That part is harder to get excited about. Yet those awkward first weeks can be some of the most satisfying you’ll ever spend learning. For most of childhood, we experienced them constantly. Somewhere along the way, something that once felt perfectly normal became something we would rather avoid.

Childhood is mostly spent being bad at things. A child cannot read, then reads slowly with a finger under each word, then one day reads without thinking about it. When a child first learns to read, nobody expects them to be fluent. Struggling is part of the process, and there’s nothing embarrassing about needing time to learn.

Something changes when we get older. We become good at a handful of things, usually our work and whatever we spent our younger years doing. Over time, those abilities become part of how we see ourselves. Being a beginner then feels strangely personal. We struggle with something simple and start wondering what it says about us. So we stay where we know we’re competent. The things we do well get a little more refined every year, while the range of things we’re willing to be bad at gets smaller.

We rarely describe it that way. We say we have no ear for languages or that we’re too old to start. Sometimes these reasons are perfectly fair. But sometimes we just don’t want to look foolish, especially in front of ourselves. We imagine other people noticing our mistakes, even though most are too occupied with their own lives to pay much attention. And when nobody else is watching, we’re still there to judge ourselves. One awkward lesson becomes evidence that we lack talent. After a while, “I’m just not that kind of person” begins to sound like a fact.

I wonder how many things you’ve wanted to try but eventually talked yourself out of. Maybe you’ve forgotten about some of them by now. I think that’s the unfortunate part of all this. We can convince ourselves that something isn’t for us without ever discovering whether we would have enjoyed it.

At the beginning, progress is rarely hard to see. In the first few weeks of swimming, you might go from struggling to coordinate your breathing to reaching the other end of the pool without stopping. Someone who has been swimming for fifteen years might work for months on a tiny improvement in their stroke. As a beginner, you get to watch effort turn into ability almost from one week to the next. That does something for your confidence, because you begin to trust your own capacity to learn. I’ve written more about this in Earn Your Confidence Through Evidence.

Even the difficult lessons can be more productive than they feel. The psychologist Robert Bjork studied how certain kinds of effortful practice can improve long-term learning, even when performance feels worse in the moment. He called these “desirable difficulties.” Of course, not every struggle is useful, but how well you perform during a particular lesson doesn’t always tell you how much you’re learning. Sometimes you leave feeling that you accomplished very little, only to discover a week later that something you struggled with has become easier.

There’s also a freedom in having no reputation to protect. Nobody expects a beginner to know what they’re doing. You’re allowed to ask the obvious question and get things wrong in front of people. You can try something simply because it interests you, without worrying about whether you’ll ever become particularly good at it. Of course, that freedom only arrives once you stop demanding so much of yourself. We often give beginners all the patience in the world, provided we’re not the beginner.

I wish we’d let ourselves enjoy that freedom a little more often.

Being new also makes things interesting again. Think of arriving in a city you’ve never visited. You notice the color of the doors and the way people greet each other in shops. The people who have lived there for years walk past all of it without looking. Something similar happens when you’ve practiced a skill long enough. More and more of it becomes automatic, and you gradually stop paying attention to things that once fascinated you. Starting something new brings back that feeling of discovering things for the first time, which I explored in How to Become Interested in Anything.

But the beginning never lasts very long. Eventually, the big improvements become smaller, the novelty wears off, and what once demanded your full attention becomes routine. You can spend years getting better at something, but you’ll never again experience those exact first weeks. The things that frustrate you now may eventually become so easy that you barely remember struggling with them.

We usually think of that as something to look forward to, and of course it is. Becoming good at something is satisfying in its own way. Still, I wonder whether we’re sometimes too eager to get there. We spend the first few weeks wishing we were already competent, even though we’ll have years to enjoy that competence if we keep going. The beginning is much shorter, and we may only recognize how special it was once it’s gone.

If we only pursue things we’re already good at, our lives gradually narrow around the abilities we happen to have. We may become extremely capable within that small territory, while entire experiences remain unknown to us because we were unwilling to feel incompetent for a little while. How many people reach old age having never tried something they might have loved, simply because they decided long ago that they weren’t the kind of person who could do it?

Epictetus told his students that if they wanted to make progress, they had to be content to be thought foolish. He was speaking about philosophy, but I think his advice reaches much further. Anyone who wants to keep learning has to make peace with being inexperienced. Otherwise, the desire to appear competent eventually becomes a limit on what we’re willing to attempt.

So if there’s something you’ve been wanting to try, give yourself the chance. You don’t have to be gifted at it, and you don’t have to turn it into something serious. You might discover that it isn’t for you after all, and that’s perfectly fine. But you might also discover something that makes your life a little more interesting, something you’ll be grateful you found for years to come.

And if you do, I hope you enjoy being a beginner while you can.

Stay stoic,

SW

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You make countless decisions every day, and most of them come easily. But the few that could change the direction of your life can leave you stuck for months. The Stoics had an interesting explanation for why these decisions are so difficult, and why preparing for them begins long before the moment you have to choose.

We get better at most things through practice, and everyday decisions are no exception. Over time, you learn how long things usually take, whose promises you can trust, and which risks are worth taking. You make a choice, see what happens, and adjust the next time. Eventually, much of what you’ve learned becomes instinct.

Major decisions rarely give us that kind of practice. You might change careers or decide whether to leave a long relationship only a handful of times in your life. Even then, it can take years to see how things turn out, and the result doesn’t always tell you whether you chose well. A careful decision can end badly because of circumstances you couldn’t predict, while a careless one can work out through luck. This makes it difficult to learn from experience when the decisions matter most.

So when a major choice comes along, we try to make up for that lack of experience by thinking harder. We gather more information, ask more people, and wait until we feel certain. Sometimes that helps. But the Stoics understood something we often overlook. Long before a major decision arrives, we’ve already developed beliefs about what is safe, what failure would mean, and what we’re capable of doing. Those beliefs influence how we see our options, often without us realizing it. And if we want to make better decisions when it matters, we need to start paying attention to the judgments we’re making today.

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The Stoics took the question seriously. They did not dismiss money, health, or a good reputation. They considered all three worth having, but they didn't believe these things determined whether someone lived well. A person could have all three and still live badly, or lose all three and still live well. What mattered was how you used what you had. How you judged, how you treated people, whether you could be relied on when things went wrong. You do not have to agree with every part of their philosophy to see the point. The things we chase can make life easier, but they cannot decide whether we live it well.

So it is worth spending some time deciding what a good life means to you. Write it down, then cross out anything you only want because someone else would see you having it. Separate what remains into the choices you can make and the outcomes you can only work toward. You may want both, but do not confuse them. What is left may be shorter than you expected, and closer than you expected. A few people you can be honest with, work you do not resent, the opportunity to care for yourself, and some hours that are your own.

That gives you something to measure your decisions against, especially when other people have strong opinions about what you should want. What follows are ten lessons I have taken from the Stoics and from my own experience. They are the ones I return to when I need to remember what sort of life I am actually trying to build.

1. Not every thought deserves your attention

A thought arrives, and because it arrived in your own head it comes with a kind of authority. We treat it as news that something has to be dealt with, and so we deal with it, and an hour later we have had an argument that never took place or planned for a disaster that never came. Epictetus wrote in the Enchiridion that people are disturbed not by things but by the judgments they form about things, and he gave his students a habit for the moment a hard thought shows up. Say to it that it is an appearance and not necessarily the thing it appears to be, and then ask whether it concerns anything you can do something about.

A great many thoughts fail there, and more fail when you ask whether there is an action at the end of them. If there is, take it or schedule it, and the thought has done its job. If there is not, you are not thinking, you are circling, and circling feels like work while producing nothing. It also helps to know when your thoughts are least reliable. The ones that arrive after eleven at night, or before you have eaten, or in the hour after someone has criticized you, are not necessarily as reliable as the ones you have when you’re rested and thinking clearly, and a thought that keeps coming back is not truer for having come back. Write the ones that will not leave on a piece of paper and read them the next day. Whatever is still standing deserves your attention, and the rest was weather, which you can let pass without following it out of the room. What you do follow is what shapes you, which I wrote about in You Are What You Attend To.

2. You can be right and still handle something badly

Being right feels like a license to say whatever follows from it, however it comes out. Once we are sure of the facts we tend to assume the tone and the timing will take care of themselves, and that the other person’s reaction is their problem. They rarely see it that way, and they are not wrong, because a true thing said in a way the other person cannot hear has achieved nothing except making you feel justified. The Stoics kept the judgment and the act apart. Knowing the right answer was one thing, and doing the fitting thing with it was a separate skill that had to be practiced on its own.

I have come to think that being right is a responsibility rather than a license, because the person who is right is the one who can afford to be gentle. Say the true thing once, plainly, and stop. The three extra sentences that establish how right you were are the ones that cost you the relationship, and they add nothing to the truth. Whether a conversation went well is decided in the week after it, not by who was right at the end.

3. Your first judgment about someone is rarely the whole story

We form a view of a person in the first minute and then spend the following years collecting evidence for it. The view forms fast because it has to, since we cannot wait to know someone before deciding how to behave with them, and the trouble is that we forget it was provisional. Epictetus told his students not to say that a man bathes badly but that he bathes quickly, and not to say that someone drinks badly but that he drinks a great deal, because unless you know what a person is trying to do you cannot know whether he is doing it badly.

Describing a person before you judge them is harder than it sounds. You know someone replied late or made a sharp comment. What you don't know is why they did it. Yet we often treat our own explanation as though it were a fact. A first judgment also says as much about you as about them, revealing what you needed that day and what you were afraid of. Some of the people who have mattered most in your life may not have impressed you at first. I try not to settle my opinion of anyone until I have seen them under pressure and seen how they treat someone who can do nothing for them, because those two situations show what the first minute cannot. People are also allowed to be different from the person they were when you first met them, which is a courtesy you will want extended to you.

4. Someone can be disappointed in you without you having done anything wrong

Other people’s disappointment feels like evidence of something we did, and so if they are let down we reason that we must have let them down, and we go looking for the fault. Sometimes it is there. Other times, their disappointment comes from expectations you never agreed to. They assumed you would stay in a certain job or follow the path they had imagined for you, even though you never promised to do either. The Stoics put what other people think of you among the things outside your control, in the same list as your body and your property, and they did not mean that opinion does not matter. They meant that you cannot run your life by it, because the people around you want different things from you, and some of them want opposite things, so disappointing no one is not available to anyone who makes their own decisions.

What matters is whether you broke something you promised or only something they assumed. If it is the first, repair it. If it is the second, you can be sorry they are hurt without agreeing that you were wrong. Say plainly what you decided and why, be kind about it, and do not try to talk them out of their disappointment, because it is theirs to carry and the attempt turns into an argument about whether they are allowed to feel it. I wrote about this at length in Don’t Let Opinions Control You.

5. You will never reach a point where nothing can go wrong

A great deal of effort goes into reaching a position where we will finally be safe. Enough money, the right job, the mortgage paid, the children settled, and then we will be able to relax. Each of these is worth having, but none of them can guarantee the security we hope they will bring. Reaching one milestone might remove a few worries, but there will always be others to take their place. The person with no money worries about rent, the person with plenty worries about markets and their own health, and the worry fills whatever room it is given. The only security I have found that holds is the kind that does not depend on circumstances, which is knowing that you have handled things before, and it is worth keeping an actual list of what you have already come through, because fear has a short memory and the list does not. Whatever you are postponing until things are safe, do a small version of it this month. The safe month is not on the calendar.

6. You don’t have to remain the person you used to be

We talk about ourselves in the present tense as though the description were fixed. I am not a morning person, I am bad with money, I am not someone who speaks up. Some of these descriptions may have been true when we first adopted them. But repeat them often enough, and what began as a habit can start to feel like a permanent fact. Seneca, who was an old man when he wrote to Lucilius, told him that he felt himself being not only reformed but transformed, and in the same letter admitted that he did not yet dare to hope there was nothing left in him that needed changing. He was not claiming to have become a new man. He was saying that the old one was still movable, at an age when we assume everything has set.

Changing often begins with acting differently long before you feel different. In the meantime, the new behavior can feel like a costume, and it becomes tempting to abandon it on the grounds that it is not really you. It was not you yet. If you wait to feel like the new person before acting like them, you may never begin.

And the old self is held in place partly by the people and places around it. Your family remembers who you were and expects it, your friends have jokes that depend on it, and your own kitchen is arranged for the person you are trying to stop being. Sometimes that means spending less time in places that pull you back into old habits. More often, it means telling the people around you how you're trying to change, so they stop expecting you to be the person you used to be.

Whenever you hear yourself say “I am” followed by a limit, what you are usually describing is a habit, and a habit has a history and can be given a different one. Pick one of them and break it once this week. One exception can be enough to show you that an old pattern is not necessarily permanent, and that you have more room to change than you thought.

7. What you repeatedly do matters more than what you intend to do

Intentions are pleasant to hold and cost nothing, which is why we have so many of them. Epictetus was blunt about the alternative. Every habit and faculty, he told his students, is preserved and increased by the corresponding actions, so if you would be a reader, read, and if you would be a writer, write, and every time you give in to anger you have not only done a bad thing but added fuel to a fire that will catch more easily next time. It works in both directions. Whatever you did today, the walk or the hour on the phone, cast a vote for the person you are becoming. Your intentions matter, but they cannot do the work for you.

If you want to know whether your actions reflect what you value, look at your calendar and your bank statement for the last month. They will not tell the whole story, since much of our time and money goes toward obligations we cannot avoid. But they can reveal the distance between the life we say we want and the one our daily choices are building. The same goes for what you repeatedly tolerate, which shapes you as surely as what you repeatedly do. When you find the gap between what you say you want and what the records show, the most effective move is usually not to add a new habit but to remove the one daily action that most contradicts you. Removing is easier than adding, and it clears the space the new thing was going to need anyway.

8. A good life will still have bad days

On a bad day the whole life comes up for review. One failed meeting or one quarrel and we are suddenly auditing our choices and the past ten years, as if the day had revealed a truth the good days were hiding. It had not. A bad day is a bad day, and the error is one of scale, since we take a reading from twenty-four hours and apply it to a life. So make no large decisions and draw no conclusions about your life on a bad day, because the question of what the day means is not one you can answer while you are in it. Let the day be bad without adding a story to it, and see what the morning after says. I wrote more about this in A Bad Day Is Not a Bad Life. A good life that has no bad days in it is not a life. It is a holiday brochure.

9. The ordinary days are the ones that make up your life

If you add up the days you would call memorable, the weddings and the trips you still talk about, they fit in a few weeks. The rest of your life has been Tuesdays. We treat these as the gaps between the real events, time to be got through on the way to something, and the result is that the bulk of a life gets lived at half attention. Seneca opens his first letter to Lucilius by telling him to hold every hour in his grasp, and he was not talking about the big hours. He meant the ones that slip away while we are postponing, which is how, he said, life speeds by.

The quality of your life is, to a degree that is hard to accept, the quality of your ordinary day, and that gives you somewhere to work. A small improvement in something you do three hundred times a year is worth more than a large one in something you do once. The first hour of the morning, the way you eat dinner, whether the phone is on the table, the last thing you do before sleep, these are where the real gains are, and they are cheap. Nobody saves for a year to improve their Wednesday evening, and yet the Wednesday evening is where they live. The holiday you are saving for will be ten days, and you will spend part of it thinking about the Wednesday evenings you are going back to.

An ordinary day asks for nothing, and so nothing in it will demand that you look up. You have to decide to. One way is to pick a single repeated moment, the walk home or the first coffee, and treat it for a week as if it were the event, with the attention you would give a view you had traveled to see. The walk home and the conversation at the table are not the waiting room. They are the appointment.

10. The people you love will not be here forever

Everyone knows this one. Epictetus told his students that when they kissed their child or their wife they should say to themselves that they were kissing a human being, meaning a mortal one, and the line can sound terribly cold. He was not telling them to love less. He was telling them to remember, in the middle of the kiss, that this was not guaranteed, because nothing else makes us pay attention to what we have been given.

We put off the visit and the phone call on the assumption that there will be another chance, and there usually is, until the one time there is not, and nobody is told in advance which time that will be. What people regret afterwards is rarely the grand gesture they never made. It is the ordinary visits they skipped and the questions they never got around to asking, about what their father was like at twenty or what their friend was afraid of, and the chance to ask them ends on a day nobody announces. Love, in the end, is mostly attention, and attention is given in ordinary hours or not at all. I wrote about what this does to grief in You Will Never Be Ready for Every Loss. But while the people you love are still here, the advice is much simpler. Make the call, ask the question you have wondered about, and say what you have been meaning to say while they can still hear it.

At the beginning, I suggested writing down what a good life would look like for you. Keep that answer somewhere you can find it. There will be days when you lose sight of it, when you get caught up in things that seem urgent and forget what you decided was important. I do too. But knowing what matters to you means you can catch yourself when that happens, even in the middle of an ordinary day, and make the next choice a little closer to the life you want.

Stay stoic,

SW

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Nearly every excuse I have made for not doing something was true, and that is what made it so hard to get past. I really was tired. The timing really was bad. I did not know enough yet, and there was a fair chance the thing would not work. We are usually told that excuses are lies we tell ourselves, and the cure on offer is to stop lying, toughen up and accept no excuses. That advice has never worked on me for long, and I think the reason is that it gets the facts wrong. You cannot shame a true statement into being false, and the tiredness is still there when the pep talk is over.

So it seems more useful to start from the other end and admit two things. The reasons not to act will always outnumber the reasons to act, and a good share of them will be true. Once you accept that, the question changes from how to get rid of them to what to do while they are still standing there.

The numbers are lopsided for a simple reason. When we want to put something off, one good reason is enough. But when we want to begin, we somehow feel the need to answer every objection first. And one is always available, because anything worth doing takes time and effort, might fail, and has to begin on some particular day that is no better than the days around it. Those four facts give you “I’m too busy,” “I’m too tired,” “it might not work” and “this is a bad week for it,” and they come free with every plan you will ever make.

This is why waiting for the reasons to run out does not work, and why arguing with them does not work either. You answer one and the next steps forward. You may even win every round, and it will not matter, because the part of you that wants to stay put has no need to win the argument. It only needs the argument to go on until the evening is over, which means the debate itself is the delay.

What goes wrong happens one step later than we tend to assume. An excuse is nearly always a true statement with a conclusion attached. I am tired, so not today. I have no money, so I cannot start. The first half is a fact, and the second half is a decision that has borrowed the fact’s authority.

Think of it like rain in the forecast, which is accurate and still only tells you to take a coat and leave ten minutes early. It has nothing to say about whether you go. A true reason works in the same way. It tells you what you’re up against, and sometimes that means changing the plan or waiting. But knowing what stands in your way is not the same as knowing there is no way forward.

Epictetus, who himself had difficulty walking, puts this in a single line of the Enchiridion.

“Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will.”

He tells his students to say the same of everything that happens to them, and they will find that each obstacle is in the way of something else and never in the way of themselves. He is not denying the leg, which he walked on every day. What he refuses is the step from “my leg is lame” to “so there is nothing for me to do.”

Cleanthes arrived in Athens with four drachmas and a wish to study philosophy under Zeno, and he had a long list of reasons to give the idea up. He had no money, not even enough to buy paper. He had to earn a living, which left him no time. And he was a slow learner. Every one of those things was true and none of them went away. What they changed was his method. He hired himself out to water gardens at night so that his days were free for lectures. He took his notes on oyster shells and on the shoulder blades of oxen. He kept at it for nineteen years, and when Zeno died it was Cleanthes who took over the school.

Some obstacles are of a harder kind, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. An illness, a parent who needs daily care, or a debt that takes every spare coin can make a thing impossible in the form you had planned it. The answer in those cases is a different route or somebody’s help, and it is never more force applied to the same plan. Cleanthes did not try harder to afford paper, after all. He went and found shells.

The method that comes out of this is short, and it begins by taking the reason seriously. Write it down as a full sentence. Then agree with it, in writing, without adding a “but” at the end. I am tired, and that is true. This matters more than it looks, because the argument is where the evening goes, and there is nothing left to argue about once you have agreed. Then ask what the smallest thing is that can still be done today, by a tired person with forty minutes. It will not be the whole plan. It might be one page, or one phone call, or ten minutes with the thing open on the desk in front of you.

Zeno used to say that well-being is attained by little and little, and is nevertheless no little thing itself. I think the small step earns its place for a second reason as well. It shows you that the conclusion never followed. You were tired and you did something anyway, and tomorrow, when the same reason turns up and is just as true, you will know from experience how much it can and cannot decide.

The list will be as long tomorrow as it is today, and a good part of it will still be true. Some people have more standing in their way than others, and some obstacles demand a different route altogether. But the people who find a way forward rarely do so because every reason against it has disappeared. They take the forecast seriously, make what adjustments they can, and go out anyway.

Stay stoic,

SW

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The Stoics taught that a wise person never regrets anything, and it is one of the claims that has made people dislike them for two thousand years. Cicero once used it in a courtroom against Cato the Younger, who was the best-known Stoic in Rome and was prosecuting Cicero’s client. He read out the Stoic rules one after another so that the court would laugh at them, and among them was that the wise man “never repents of anything, is never deceived in anything, and never alters his opinion.” You can hear why it worked. A person who regrets nothing sounds either like someone who has never done anything wrong or like someone who has done plenty and feels fine about it.

What makes the claim strange is that the Stoics were harder on their own mistakes than almost anyone. Seneca told his friend Lucilius to “prove yourself guilty, hunt up charges against yourself,” and Epictetus has a whole lecture addressed to a student who had let himself go downhill. These were people who looked at what they had done wrong, in detail and often. So when they called regret a mistake, they meant something narrower than looking back and admitting a fault. They meant the thing regret turns into for the rest of us, and I think it is worth describing exactly, because we tend to mistake it for conscience.

What separates regret from grief or disappointment is one extra thought, which is that it could have gone differently and that we were the ones who could have made it so. That thought is what keeps it running. We replay the conversation and give ourselves the better line. We work out where we would be living now if we had taken the other job or stayed with the other person. We go back to the hour before the mistake, when it could still have been avoided, as though there were something left to do there. And it does not fade the way other pain fades. Something said fifteen years ago can arrive in the shower as sharp as it was on the day.

We hold on to it for a reason, and the reason is a decent one. Regret feels like taking responsibility. To stop regretting something seems to mean deciding that it did not matter, or that we have let ourselves off, and nobody with a conscience wants to do that. So we go on suffering over it, on the quiet assumption that the suffering is the punishment we deserve. The trouble is that the suffering reaches nobody. The person we hurt is not helped by it, the chance we missed does not come back, and after ten years of regretting we are usually no better at the thing we got wrong.

Seneca’s instruction to Lucilius is longer than the part I quoted, and the rest of it is what we skip. “Play the part,” he wrote, “first of accuser, then of judge, last of intercessor.” An intercessor is someone who pleads for mercy on another person’s behalf. Think of regret like a trial in which only the accuser ever gets to speak. He reads out the charge night after night with great conviction, and there is no judge to weigh it, nobody to speak for the defense and no sentence handed down, which means the case can never be closed. A trial like that can run for forty years. The Stoics had no objection to putting yourself on trial. Their objection was to a trial that never reaches a verdict, and the rest of what Seneca told Lucilius is how you get it to one.

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Marcus did what an emperor had to do and gathered his army to march against him. The historian Cassius Dio records what he said to the soldiers before they set out, and it is a strange speech for a man in that position. He told them he felt more grief than anger. He also said that his one fear was that Cassius would kill himself, or be killed by someone else, before the two of them could meet, because that would take from him the only prize he wanted out of the war. The prize, he said, was “to forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.”

He never got the chance, because about three months into the revolt Cassius was killed by two of his own officers. They brought the head to Marcus, who would not look at it and ordered it buried. Soon afterwards Cassius’s letters were found, and they would have shown which senators and officers had taken his side. According to Dio, Marcus had them destroyed without reading any of them, and he put almost no one to death for the revolt.

What makes the story hard to take in is that Marcus did two things we assume cannot go together. He raised an army against the man, and he wanted to forgive him. We usually take forgiving to mean letting the matter drop, or saying it was not so bad, or having the person back, and he did none of those. I think he understood forgiveness better than we tend to, and that a good deal of the trouble people have with forgiving a betrayal comes from believing it asks for things it does not ask for.

A betrayal hurts differently from ordinary bad luck, because the person who let you down knew you and did it anyway. It also reaches backwards, into years you thought were settled. An illness or a theft takes something from the years ahead of you. A betrayal also takes the years behind you, because you can no longer be sure what any of them meant. People who have been through it often describe going back over old memories, a holiday or a kindness or an ordinary dinner, and finding that they no longer know how to read them. The other thing it takes is confidence in your own judgment. Having been wrong about one person for ten years, you start to wonder who else you are wrong about. I think that loss is the most expensive, because you need your judgment for everyone you will meet from now on.

Epictetus gave a whole lecture on friendship, and he begins it with puppies. They roll over each other and lick each other’s faces, and you would say nothing could be fonder. Then he says, “throw a bit of meat between them, and you will see.” He says the same of people. Put a piece of land between a father and his son, or a throne between two brothers, and you find out what the affection was resting on. His rule is that every living thing is pulled most strongly toward whatever it wants most for itself. People stay loyal for as long as being loyal does not cost them that thing. On the day it does, they go after what they want, and that is the day you call the betrayal.

The first thing I take from this is an answer to whether any of it was real. The puppies were not pretending. Their play was real, and it had simply never been tested against something either of them wanted more. The warmth you remember was probably very real too. What you learned later is that there was something they wanted more. That is a hard thing to learn, but it lets you keep most of your past, and you do not have to go back and relabel every good evening as a lie.

The same idea answers the doubt about your own judgment, because loyalty that has never been tested and loyalty that will hold look the same from the outside, sometimes for twenty years. Often there was nothing to see until the meat landed. Sometimes there was, though. The meat had landed before in small ways, and you saw how they behaved when something minor was at stake, and you explained it away because you wanted the friendship. If that is true it is worth admitting, and admitting it is different from blaming yourself. The fault for the betrayal stays with the person who did it. What you take away is a rule for next time, that the way someone handles a small temptation is the best preview you will get of how they handle a large one.

Explaining a betrayal this way does not excuse it, and Epictetus is not trying to excuse anyone. An explanation is useful to you in a way an excuse is not. If you decide the person was simply a monster, you have learned nothing you can use. If you can say that when it came to it they put money, or comfort, or someone else’s good opinion above you, then you know what happened, and you know what to look for in other people.

What a betrayed person often does next is stop trusting anyone, because it feels like the lesson. Seneca thought that was as big a mistake as trusting everyone. “It is equally faulty,” he wrote to Lucilius, “to trust everyone and to trust no one.” He adds that people who are always afraid of being deceived end up teaching others to deceive them. I read that as a warning about what suspicion does to the people around you. Treat an honest friend as a suspect for long enough and they will stop making the effort. If you go that way, the one who betrayed you has also cost you every friend you might have made afterwards, and those people did nothing to you.

Epictetus ends his lecture with a test that works better than suspicion and can be applied to anyone. Do not ask whether two people are family, he says, or how long they have known each other. Ask only where they place their interest, in things outside themselves or in the kind of person they are trying to be. Someone whose good is their own character can afford to stay loyal when it costs them. So pay attention to what people do on the days when keeping their word is expensive, because one of those days tells you more than years of pleasant company. I wrote more about choosing whom to believe in How to Know Who to Trust.

That leaves forgiveness, and I think the word causes more trouble than the thing. We hear “forgive” and assume it means trusting the person again, as if nothing had happened. For someone who has been deeply betrayed, that may be impossible, or simply unwise. So they conclude that they are unable to forgive, and add it to the list of things that are wrong with them.

Think of it like a debt that the other person can never repay. When someone betrays you they take something they cannot give back, and from that day they owe you. You can spend years trying to collect. Collecting is called revenge when you are active about it and resentment when you are waiting, and both keep you in business with the one person you most want to be finished with. You know the forms it takes. You rehearse the speech you will give on the day they finally admit it. You check whether their life has gone badly since. You tell the story again to a new listener and hope that this one’s outrage will feel like payment. None of it works, because they cannot return the years or unsay what was said, and an apology, if one ever comes, is a small payment against a very large sum.

Forgiving, in this picture, is writing the debt off, which means that you stop expecting payment and stop arranging your days around getting it. A bank that writes off a bad loan has not decided the borrower was right to default, and it does not lend to him again. It has accepted that the money is gone and closed the file so that it can get on with its business. Forgiveness in this sense needs nothing from the other person. They do not have to apologize, or agree with you, or even know.

Seneca draws nearly the same line in On Clemency, where he explains why the Stoics were wary of pardon. He defines pardon as “the remitting of a deserved punishment,” and their objection was that it lets a person off as though the wrong did not count. What a wise person offers in its place, he says, is mercy. They go on holding that the act was wrong, and they choose their response by what will do some good. So you can write off the debt and still end the friendship. You can write it off and still tell the truth about what happened when someone asks. Whether you ever extend credit to that person again is a separate decision, and it should be made the way any lender would make it, on evidence of changed behavior over a long time.

This matters most when you cannot walk away, when the person is your brother at every family dinner or the father of your children. Writing off the debt is what lets you be civil to them without pretending. You deal with them on cash terms. You are polite, you keep the arrangements you have made, and you rely on nothing they promise until it has been delivered. That is neither a punishment nor a reconciliation, only an accurate picture of where things stand.

I do not think forgiveness can be hurried, and you do not need it in order to move forward. I argued in Don’t Allow Yourself to Become a Victim that you can get on with your life well before you have forgiven anyone, and I still think that is the right order. Psychologists who study forgiveness separate the decision from the feeling. The decision can be made on an ordinary Tuesday, and it amounts to resolving that you will not seek the other person’s harm. The feeling comes months or years later, in its own time, and on some days it goes backwards.

Seneca has one suggestion for the feeling. If we want to judge fairly, he says in On Anger, we should start by admitting that none of us is without fault. Epictetus’s rule about going after what you want most was a rule about every living thing, and that includes you. I am not suggesting you have done what was done to you. But a confidence repeated, or a promise let slide on the day it became expensive, belongs to the same family, and remembering your own makes it a little easier to see the other person as someone who failed a test instead of as a different kind of creature.

Marcus had every means of collecting what Cassius and his supporters owed him, since he was the emperor and the letters were in his hands. He chose not to find out who else was in his debt, and I think he understood what the knowledge would do to him. He would have looked at every senator for the rest of his life and wondered. So he wrote the debt off, and in the same act he refused to let one man’s betrayal turn him into someone who suspected everybody else. He had also raised an army against Cassius, which is the part we forget when we assume that forgiving means doing nothing.

It is easy to read the last part of what he told the soldiers, about continuing faithful to one who has broken faith, as loyalty to Cassius. I think he meant staying the kind of man who keeps faith, whatever Cassius had done. The person who betrayed you has shown you what they wanted most. You will not get the years back, and you may never get the apology. You can still come out of it as someone who keeps their word and is able to trust again, and they have no say in that.

Stay stoic,

SW

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“When I see a man in anxiety, I say to myself, what can it be that this fellow wants?”

We would ask something else. We ask an anxious person what is wrong, or what they are afraid of, and often the true answer is that nothing has happened yet. That is close to the definition of the thing. Psychologists separate fear from anxiety by what each one is about. Fear is the response to a danger that is present and clear, like the car that pulls out in front of you. Anxiety is the response to something that might happen, has not happened yet, and may never happen at all. Fear ends when the car has passed. Anxiety has nothing to end it, because the thing it is waiting for is still undecided, and so it can go on for an afternoon or for ten years.

You can recognize it by what it makes you do. You rehearse a conversation that has not taken place, sometimes a dozen times. You read the message again after you have sent it. You ask someone whether they are sure it will be fine, feel better for ten minutes, and then want to ask again.

Your body responds to both in much the same way. The heart speeds up, the stomach tightens, sleep gets lighter and attention narrows onto the threat. That is a good arrangement for the few seconds it takes a car to pass. Kept up for months, it becomes the list of symptoms the World Health Organization gives for anxiety disorders, which includes trouble concentrating, irritability, a pounding heart, poor sleep and “a sense of impending danger, panic or doom.”

Think of it like a smoke alarm. An alarm that goes off when you burn the toast is a nuisance. An alarm that stays quiet during a real fire can kill you. So every sensible smoke alarm is built to go off too often, and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has argued that evolution set our own alarm the same way. For most of human history a false alarm cost a few minutes of a racing heart, while a missed danger could cost a life, and we are descended from the people whose alarms rang early. An anxious mind is in that sense working as designed. The trouble is that the alarm now sits in a house it was not built for.

It was built for dangers that were close, physical and quickly over. The phone in your pocket now reports every fire in the world, at any hour, and you can do nothing about almost any of them. There is also some evidence that the phone has made us worse at not knowing things. An analysis of fifty-two North American studies found that people’s reported difficulty with uncertainty rose between 1999 and 2014, in step with the spread of mobile phones and the internet. That is a correlation, and the researchers say so, but their explanation is hard to dismiss. A device that can settle any small doubt in seconds, whether it is where she is or what a symptom means, leaves us with less and less practice at leaving a doubt open.

The numbers point the same way. By the WHO’s latest count, 470 million people had an anxiety disorder in 2023, which makes it the most common mental disorder in the world, and only about one in four of them receives any treatment. In the United States, the share of adults who said they felt more anxious than the year before went from 32 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2023 and 43 percent in 2024. Those figures leave out everyone who gets through the day perfectly well and still declines the invitation, puts off the phone call, or decides not to apply. I think that is where anxiety costs the most for those of us who would never call it a disorder. We pay for it in the things we stop doing.

Almost all the advice we are given is about turning the alarm down. Breathe slowly, go for a walk, leave the phone in another room. It is good advice, and it treats the noise as the problem. But an alarm is a report about something else, and Epictetus was interested in the something else. He wanted to know what the alarm was guarding, which is why his question to an anxious person was what they wanted. He believed the answer was always the same kind of thing, whether the person in front of him was a singer with stage fright or, in one of his examples, a king waiting to meet a philosopher. He also believed that the answer shows you the one part of anxiety you can change.

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The friend you call when things go wrong was once a stranger you almost did not talk to. The work you are proud of began as an attempt you were not sure you could finish. On the day you said yes to any of it, you had no proof it would work. And yet when a new decision arrives, we ask for exactly that proof. We want to see the ending before we agree to begin.

“I’ll start once I know it’s going to work out.”

That kind of knowledge exists only about things that are finished. You can be certain about last year because last year is over. A decision you have not made yet cannot give you that feeling, however long you study it. So there is a point in every decision where you have collected what can be known. After that point you are no longer gathering information. You are only waiting.

Waiting feels like the safe option, even though it has no right to. Staying where you are is also a choice, and its outcome is just as hidden. The job you keep, the conversation you put off, and the idea you leave in a drawer all lead somewhere you cannot see either. No certain option is on the table. You are choosing between two unknowns, and one of them at least points toward something you want.

Seneca met this problem in On Benefits, while asking whether you should help a person when you cannot know whether they will be grateful. His answer covers every decision a person makes. We never wait for complete certainty, he writes, because the truth is hard to reach. We follow good reasons. The farmer sows without knowing the harvest. The sailor leaves port without knowing the sea. People marry and raise children with no promise about how any of it will go.

So the useful question before a decision is whether you have good reasons, and that one can be answered today. Write down what you know, what you want, and the worst realistic result. Ask if you could live with that result. If the reasons hold, you have everything a human being ever gets before acting.

Good reasons still fail sometimes. A careful decision can end badly and a careless one can turn out fine, so the result alone cannot tell you whether you did well. The Stoics judged an action another way, and Cicero records it in On Ends, where Cato uses the picture of an archer shooting at a target.

The archer decides how much he trains, how he stands, how carefully he aims, and when he lets go. Once the arrow is in the air he cannot touch it, and a sudden wind can carry a good shot off the target. So every shot has two parts. The shot itself belongs to him. Where the arrow lands belongs to him only partly. The Stoic advice is to put your effort and your self-respect into the part that is yours.

In your life, the shot is your preparation, the care you put into the decision, and the effort you give. The landing is whether you got the job, whether the business survived, whether the person said yes. You can prepare for an interview for two weeks and lose the position to someone the company had already chosen. That was a good shot that missed, and the miss alone is no reason to change how you prepare. You can also walk in unprepared and get lucky. That was a bad shot that hit, and it teaches a habit that will fail you later. After anything important, ask two separate questions. Did I shoot well? Where did it land? If the landing shows you something you could have done better, use it. Otherwise leave your method alone.

None of this means the archer stops caring about the target. He wants to hit it, and every hour of his training is for that. What changes is where his attention goes during the shot. An archer who is thinking about the prize, or about how a miss will look to the crowd, has less attention left for his hands. Fear of the result makes the shot worse. Letting go of the result for the length of the shot gives him his best chance of getting it.

A shot is over in a second, and the things you want can take months. For longer plans Seneca describes a habit in On Tranquillity of Mind. The wise person attaches a condition to every plan. I will sail, unless something prevents it. Disappointment hurts less, he adds, for someone who never promised himself success.

You can use this with any plan you have now. Say the plan, add the condition, and then spend five minutes naming what could get in the way. An obstacle you have thought about in advance is usually easier to meet. One you never considered can feel like the end of the whole plan. Then commit as fully as if nothing will stop you, because the condition is there to prepare you for a setback and gives you no reason to hold back.

Often we want to know the future because we doubt we could handle it. If you were sure you could cope with whatever came, you would feel less need to see it first. Marcus Aurelius told himself not to let the future disturb him, because he would meet it with the same reason he was already using on the present. That is a kind of security that comes from knowing yourself, and unlike certainty, it can be built. Every time you act on good reasons, take a miss, and shoot again, you collect evidence that you can cope when things do not go as planned. That evidence does more against fear than any forecast.

The future will stay hidden for as long as you live. The person who walks into it is being built today, by everything you do without knowing how it ends.

Stay stoic,

SW

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I want you to think about the last time you felt something so strongly that it seemed to reach you before reason did.

Maybe it was anger. Maybe fear, shame, or envy. You could see what was happening clearly enough. You may even have known what the sensible thing to do was. But the feeling had already arrived, your body had already reacted, and for a few moments it seemed to be speaking louder than everything else.

I think we are often too hard on ourselves for those moments. We assume that if we were calmer, wiser, or more disciplined, we would not feel so much in the first place.

The Stoics did not see it that way.

Around the year 150, a Roman writer named Aulus Gellius took a ship from Corfu to Brindisi. On board was a well-known Stoic teacher. During the night a storm hit. Water poured into the ship, and by morning the sky was black and the wind had not let up. The passengers screamed, wept and prayed.

Gellius kept his eyes on the philosopher. The man did not scream and he did not weep. But his face had gone white, and he looked as frightened as everyone else.

When the sea calmed, a rich passenger walked over and mocked him in front of the others.

Some philosopher you are.

I was not afraid at all, and you turned pale.

Gellius had been wondering the same thing, and later he asked the teacher in private. Why had he gone pale? The teacher did not defend himself. He took out a volume of Epictetus and read Gellius the answer.

The rich passenger had made an easy mistake. He assumed that a man in command of himself would feel nothing, so the philosopher had failed the moment his face went white, and he himself had passed by staying calm. But the passenger had not done anything. He had simply not been afraid. If that counts as self-control, then self-control is luck, something that happens to you or does not, and there would be nothing to practice. The Stoics taught the opposite. A steady mind is built, and the pale teacher on the deck shows what it looks like from the inside while the building is going on.

You have stood where he stood, if never on a ship. Something happens, and the feeling arrives before you have finished understanding what happened. Anger, envy, fear, shame. You are not confused about the situation. Often you can see it clearly, and you can see what the sensible thing to do would be. You do something else anyway. Later, when the feeling has drained out of you, you cannot explain why the part of you that knew better never got a say.

What makes this hard to fix is that the feeling was not simply wrong. Anger often points at a real unfairness. Envy tells you the truth about what you want. Shame sometimes catches a failure that nobody else would have named. The feeling did its job. The trouble came from what arrived with it, an urge to speak, to grab, to hide, to leave. That urge borrowed the feeling’s authority, and you acted on it before it had been checked.

So there are two questions in that moment, and they have different answers. Is the feeling telling me something true? And should I do what it is telling me to do? Being angry does not settle what you ought to do about it. That gap between the two questions is what the Stoics spent so much care on.

The book the teacher read from was the fifth volume of Epictetus’s Discourses, which is now lost. We know what it said only because Gellius copied the passage down. When something frightening happens, it said, the impression of it strikes the mind before the mind has done anything. Nobody chooses to be struck. The wise person is struck like anyone else, and may go pale and flinch for a moment. The difference comes next. The wise person does not agree with the impression. He does not add his own judgment that this is terrible and something must be done. The fool agrees, and from then on the fear is his.

Seneca gives the same sequence in his book On Anger, and I have been through his account before, so the short version will do. First comes a movement of the body that happens on its own, the face flushing or going white, the breath catching, and no amount of wisdom removes it. Second comes a judgment, something like I have been wronged and ought to pay this back, or this is unbearable and I have to get out. That judgment is still open to reason. Third is what happens if you agree with it. The feeling now has the wheel. Anger is Seneca’s example, but he treats it as the pattern for the passions in general, and the teacher on the deck is that pattern in action. He got as far as the second stage and stopped there, and that is the whole difference between him and the passengers who screamed.

Think of it like a messenger who runs into your house and shouts that a man down the road has been insulting you in front of everyone, and that you had better go and deal with him right now.

He has told you two things. That the man insulted you is news. That you should go down there is an order. The news has earned a hearing, because something may well have happened. The order has not, because the messenger is not in charge of you. He heard one side of it, he is red in the face, and he will not be the one who has to live with what you do next.

Every strong emotion is that messenger. Fear reports that something you value is exposed. Envy reports that there is something you want and had not admitted. Shame reports that you fell short of a standard you hold, in front of people whose judgment you have given weight to. Anger reports that a line was crossed. Each report may be true, and each arrives with an order that was written in the first second, before anyone knew anything.

The trouble is that the gap between the report and the order is short. Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school, described it with a picture that the physician Galen preserved. A person walking can stop whenever they choose. A person running cannot. Their legs carry them past the place where they meant to stop, because the movement has become bigger than their will. A passion, he said, is the mind running. The only place you can stop is before you start to run, which means the tool has to work in the few seconds before agreement, and it has to be small enough to remember when your face is already hot.

In practice, it comes down to the following three moves, simple enough to remember while the feeling is still hot.

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The reason is simple. Wants arrive long before we are able to choose anything. As children we learn what to want the same way we learn to talk, by copying the people around us. We see what our parents praise. We see what gets applause at school, who is respected on our street, and what makes our friends jealous. By the time we sit down at eighteen to decide what we want from life, a lot of the deciding has already been done.

You can test this on yourself. Take the thing you are working hardest for right now, and ask whether you would still want it if nobody could ever know you had it. No photos, no telling anyone, no change in how people look at you. Some wants pass that test easily. Others go strangely quiet, and then you have to ask what you were really wishing for.

This is how a person ends up with one of the saddest experiences adult life has to offer. You work for years toward something, you get it, and then you stand inside it with a thought you can’t say out loud.

“This is what I always wanted. So why doesn’t it feel like mine?”

The usual advice is to forget what others expect and find out what you really want, deep down. The trouble is that there is no “deep down” of the kind this advice imagines. If you took away everything you learned from other people, your language, your taste, your sense of right and wrong, your idea of a good life, nothing would be left to do the wanting. There is no untouched version of you underneath, waiting to be found.

So we seem to be stuck. Our wants came from outside, and there is no pure inside to go back to. If that is true, how can any want be your own? And how can you be responsible for wants you never chose?

The Stoics worked on questions very close to this problem more than two thousand years ago, and their answer is more practical than anything I have found in modern advice.

Continue reading with a paid subscription to learn how Seneca explained where our wants come from, the Stoic philosopher Panaetius’s four-part way of finding the life that fits you, what Cicero says to do when you discover you chose the wrong one, and Epictetus’s method for turning an inherited want into your own.

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How do you know what day you were born?

You were there, but you don’t remember it. You know the date because your parents told you, and because it is printed on a document that someone else filled in. You have repeated it your whole life, on every form, without once asking for proof.

Now try a few more. How do you know the earth is billions of years old? How do you know the medicine in your bathroom does what the box says? How do you know that a country you have never visited exists? If you went through everything you believe and kept only what you have personally seen and tested, very little would be left. Almost everything you know, you know because someone told you and you decided to believe them.

On a normal day this works fine. The trouble starts when the people you rely on disagree with each other.

Say you see two doctors about the same problem. One tells you to have the operation. The other tells you to wait. Both studied for years, both have treated hundreds of patients, and both are sure. You have to choose between them, and you did not go to medical school.

The usual advice is to think for yourself. So you go home and start reading, and you read for the whole weekend. By Sunday night you have learned some new words, and you are no closer to knowing which doctor is right. A few hours of reading cannot replace twenty years of training, and deep down you know that.

So you choose another way, usually without realizing it. You go with the doctor who sounded more confident. Or the one who explained things more clearly, or who seemed kinder, or who gave you the answer you were hoping for. It feels like you weighed the evidence. What you did was pick the person you liked more.

I have to admit that my post from last August did not help with this. I wrote that thinking for yourself does not mean ignoring experts, and that the real skill is telling true expertise from false authority. Then I moved on. I never said how to do that, and that is the hard part.

So how do you decide who to trust when you are not able to check their work?

The question is bigger than doctors and scientists. There is the friend you call before every big decision. There is the parent whose ideas about money you picked up as a child, long before you could question them. There are the two or three people whose opinions you hear in your head when you are trying to make up your mind. Do they deserve that place? Would you be happy to end up thinking the way they think? Because if you listen to someone for long enough, that is what happens.

This is the whole reason I write this newsletter. The goal I have for every reader is sovereignty. Over your attention, over your thinking, and over how you respond to whatever the world puts in front of you. A mind that can be talked into anything is not sovereign. But a mind that trusts nobody is not sovereign either, because it ends up believing whatever it happened to stumble on and calling that independence. A sovereign mind still takes other people’s word for most things. What makes it sovereign is that it chooses whose word to take. That choice is one we rarely make for ourselves. It gets made for us, by whoever is loudest, or closest, or most sure of themselves.

There is a way to make it yourself, and you don’t have to become an expert in anything to use it. It starts with a fact that sounds like bad news at first. Nobody thinks for themselves in the way we like to imagine. Not you, not me, and not the experts either.

Continue reading with a paid subscription to learn why even the world's best scientists have to take each other's word, what Seneca told Lucilius about choosing whom to follow, the signs of character that show whether someone deserves your trust, and what the Stoics did when two trustworthy people still disagreed.

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You know the kind of day I mean, even if the details have faded. The news you did not want. The months when money, or your health, or a person you loved took up every corner of your mind. You lay awake doing the math on how much more you could take, and the answer you kept getting was not much.

And then you got through it. Probably not gracefully. Nobody does it gracefully. But you are here reading this, which means the day ended and you kept going.

The strange part is what happened afterward, which was probably nothing. You never stopped to register that you had survived something you had judged unsurvivable. You moved on to the next worry. And when that old trouble comes to mind today it looks small. A little embarrassing, even, that it scared you so much.

It did not get smaller. You got bigger. And the trouble with getting bigger is that you can’t feel it happen.

Think of it like the pencil marks parents make on a doorframe. No child has ever felt themselves grow. From the inside you are the same height you were yesterday, and the day before that, so as far as your own senses can tell you have always been this tall. The only reason a child knows otherwise is that someone drew a line on the wood last spring, and now the line is at their chin.

Strength grows the same way, except nobody draws the lines. Once you can carry something it stops feeling heavy, and once it stops feeling heavy your mind stops counting it. The hard conversation you can now have without shaking. The loss you learned to live beside. Each was once far above your head, and today you would have to bend down to find the mark.

This leaves you with a picture of yourself that is always out of date. The person whose limits you consult before every decision is the person from several lines ago. You turn down things because that person could not have handled them. You brace for blows that would have flattened them. The one who would do the handling today is someone you have not been introduced to.

Seneca thought there was only one way to get that introduction. In his essay On Providence he imagines speaking to someone who has had an easy run through life, and he does not envy them. He pities them.

He goes on to say that no one ever learned what they could do without being put to the test. There is no way to look inward and read the number. So whatever else a hard season is, it is also the only time anyone takes your measure, and the easy years, for all their comfort, leave you a stranger to yourself.

That changes what to do with the question that shows up at three in the morning during the sleepless night.

“Can I handle this?”

It has no answer at three in the morning, or at any hour before the thing itself. You are asking for a measurement that can only be taken afterward. Knowing that is a kind of permission to stop asking, and Epictetus offers something better to ask in its place. In the Enchiridion, the short handbook of his teaching, he tells his students that whenever something happens to them, they should turn to themselves and ask what faculty they have for dealing with it. Faced with hard labor, he says, you will find endurance. Faced with insult, you will find patience.

His wording is that you will find it, with no maybe attached.

The Stoics believed a human being comes equipped for a human life, and that the equipment shows itself when it is called for and not a minute before. Strength, on this view, is something that gets called up when needed. That explains why a search for it on a calm day comes back empty, and why you worry it isn’t there.

If strength arrives on demand, then waiting until you feel strong enough means waiting for something that only comes after you begin. So begin before you feel ready. And ask only what today demands, because nobody is ever handed the whole thing at once. Some days the demand is patience. Some days it is one phone call you do not want to make. Some days it is only getting to bed and trying again tomorrow. Do that much, and leave the rest to the taller person who will be standing here later.

None of this settles the worry about speed. You can accept that you got through things and still feel that it took too long, that others your age are far ahead, that you keep having to learn the same lesson again. The Stoics have a good answer to this, and his name is Cleanthes.

He was a boxer who, the story goes, arrived in Athens with four drachmas to his name and became a student of Zeno, the founder of the school. To pay his way he spent his nights drawing water in a garden and his days studying. He was too poor for papyrus, so he is said to have written down Zeno’s lectures on oyster shells and the shoulder blades of oxen. He was also slow. The other students noticed, and they called him the donkey. Cleanthes did not argue. He said a donkey was the only animal strong enough to carry Zeno’s load.

He studied under Zeno for nineteen years. When Zeno died, the school did not pass to one of the quick ones. It passed to the donkey.

Cleanthes never entered the comparison with the quick students, because he could not win it and it measured nothing he cared about. The only fair comparison is with your own last mark, and against that one a slow person who keeps going wins every time. He also did not wait for better conditions. There was no money, so there were night shifts. There was no papyrus, so there were oyster shells. Whatever you are trying to build, some rough version of it is possible with what you have this week, and the rough version is where everyone who finished anything began.

The Stoics had a word for someone in his position, and in yours. Prokopton, the one who is making progress. It was the most any of them claimed to be. Seneca wrote flatly that he was not a wise man and never would be. So the feeling of not being there yet does not separate you from the people who lived well. It was their condition too, every one of them, for their whole lives. There is no finished group that you are failing to join.

What does progress look like, then, if nobody arrives? The best answer I know comes from Hecato, a Stoic whose books are all lost. It survives only because Seneca copied it into a letter to his friend Lucilius as the best thing he had read that day. Hecato puts the question to himself, and you would expect a list in reply. Anger mastered, fear defeated. His whole answer is one sentence.

Only begun. A friend is the person who remembers what you have come through when you have forgotten it, who keeps the doorframe on your behalf. Hecato’s progress was that he had started keeping his own.

You can start keeping yours tonight, and it takes ten minutes. Write down three things you once believed you could not get through, and next to each one, what you were afraid would happen and what happened instead. Then write down the thing that worries you now, put today’s date on it, and keep the page somewhere you will find it. I wish someone had told me to do this at twenty. I would have spent far fewer nights certain that this time was different. And when you catch yourself being cruel about your own progress, ask whether you would say the same thing to a friend in your exact situation. You would remind them what they have already survived, and then you would ask what they need today. You are allowed to do that for yourself.

Seneca adds a comment under Hecato’s line. A person like that, he says, can never be alone, and is a friend to all mankind. When someone’s own bad day arrives, they go looking for a person who has been through something and come out steady, someone who can say from experience that the math done at night is wrong. Every day you got through is one you can now help somebody else through. Your strength was never only for you.

The next hard day will look impossible when it arrives, because it will stand above your last mark. By the time it is over, so will you.

Stay stoic,

SW

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Sam’s experiences in war, combined with his study of philosophy and human nature, have given him a unique perspective on resilience, hardship, and meaning. His writing challenges readers to look beyond comfort and convenience and consider what our ancestors, warriors, and ancient philosophers can teach us about being human.

“τί οὖν” or “What then?” was a question Epictetus repeatedly used to examine the ideas he wrestled with. Sam’s respect for his favorite philosopher runs so deep that he paid a graduate student to teach him Greek so he could read Epictetus in his original tongue.

After reading this outstanding essay, I encourage you to subscribe to What then? for more writing from Sam that will challenge how you view adversity in the pursuit of a meaningful life.

Here is Sam Alaimo of What then?:

Civilization is strange. We removed the burden of nature only to find a far greater burden—the burden of freedom from nature.

We can see this truth in a civilizational malady everywhere we look. But most of all, when we turn our gaze within, we see it in ourselves. It comes in two parts. First, a chronic desire for the next moment: the next vacation, promotion, phone, or blissful image in our skull of a perfect future, and all we need to do to earn it is be miserable just a little while longer… or so we tell ourselves. And second, to keep this desire active, the malady demands a willful blindness to a cosmic truth—what we are seeking over there already exists right here.

Let us look at this from a boots on the ground perspective.

Eating is fascinating because it can be viewed in a number of ways: the mere ingestion of calories, a mindless animalistic impulse, or as the art of seeing the entirety of the universe concealed within the granularity of a bit of taste.

I see this human malady operative within myself, so as an antidote to it, I ask a question while eating: What is my experience while eating this? We keep a Household Diary in the kitchen, a daily log of field observations, in which we write down one or two sentences about something small—yet epic—from our day in and around the house. The act of stopping and putting ink to paper cuts everything else away but the singular object of our focus for the briefest of moments. It might be the antics of a mourning dove or a fox, the various acts of mutiny our mutt likes to experiment with, or the simple act of eating. I reread one from a few days ago in which I compared the taste of two different types of grapes. It struck me that once I took the concept a step further, my mind turned to one of my favorite quotes from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. With it, our civilizational malady can be seen from a more Stoic angle.

Cotton Candy grapes taste light and bright. They remind me of the total inner release of control of skydiving through cumulonimbus clouds which temporarily blind us to the Earth hurtling towards us at one hundred twenty miles an hour. They turn my mind to the question of release. What is it, exactly? If we can release control in one life-and-death domain, why can we not release control in each of the smaller domains make up daily life? I am suddenly able to see civilization from outside the limitations of its boundaries.

Moon Drop grapes, on the other hand, are aggressive. I see a pre-state hunter lathered in a mixture of charcoal and pig’s blood stalking through cobalt blue waterfalls, feet silently heel-to-toing through lime green ferns. Biting a Moon Drop grape in half reveals that roughly one millimeter in from its wine-black exoderm are vibrant purple veins that gently fade into a translucent center. It is the most violently subtle assertion of beauty I have seen. I feel as though eating this grape is a privilege.

And yet… the astronomical difference between these two types of grapes is as nothing compared to the difference between the grapes and everything else we could be thinking about as we eat them.

Epictetus hit on this theme nearly two thousand years ago. In standard Epictetus fashion, he asks himself a rhetorical question a luckless new student might ask. He then answers it with his characteristic—and yet compassionate—brutality:

“When, then, shall I see Athens once more and the Acropolis?” Poor man, are you not satisfied with what you are seeing every day? Have you anything finer or greater to look at than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea? And if you really understand Him that governs the universe, and bear Him about within you, do you yet yearn for bits of stone and a pretty rock?”

What is Epictetus telling us? That our desire to be somewhere else is in fact a confession we are not content to be ourselves. That we possess millions of sensory nerves designed to attune us to every subtle shift in the wind, micro inflection in a child’s speech, and nuance of the taste of a fig, and yet we consistently use this same extraordinary capacity to invent the most ingenious and self-destructive grievances imaginable.

What, then, follows?

It seems we are born with a simple choice: we may make of ourselves slaves to relative comparisons, or we can choose to be free men and women in obedience to the creed of absolute awe.

Take relative comparisons: We are physically in this immediate sensory world, but mentally we are far, far away in some abstract world that does not exist. We want to travel and lay eyes on “bits of stone and a pretty rock,” which is how Epictetus described Athens, and yet we care nothing that we are standing below the moon and stars and can hold in our palms a bundle of figs or grapes off a vine. We crave to bring our vision of the future to reality, and yet once we get it, suddenly it is worthless, and it becomes a mere stepping stone to a better vision of the future. It is a bitter irony that it is a vision we may never even live to see.

Is this a life in accordance with nature? Or are those who are obsessed with seeing Athens the same as those who are most terrified of sitting alone in a quiet room? Is this a love of beauty? Or is this merely a flight from the self?

Take absolute awe. We see the universe contained within the borders of the skin of a grape. Wherever we stand, we see Athens. Everywhere we turn our heads are bits of stone and pretty rocks, but they simply bear a different name. Thus a five cent piece of fruit is an encounter with God.

This is not a call to abandon the future and live a life of low standards. Far from it. Rather, it is to learn to love a paradox: the only way to be satisfied with an extraordinary future, which will itself become the everyday, is to be extraordinarily satisfied with the everyday.

And so it is striking that a civilizational malady can be cured by a grape.

What then is left but to view a single grape not as a mere amusement, but as sunlight with a flavor wrapped in iridescent flesh we consciously choose to assign absolute value to? What is left but to compare civilizational restlessness to the sovereign gaze Epictetus is ungently reminding us we are capable of: seeing the sun, moon, stars, and earth in every immediate and singular bite we are fortunate to take in our time here?

If this essay resonated with you, I strongly encourage you to subscribe to What then?. Sam is doing thoughtful and original work on philosophy, adversity, human nature, and what it means to live well.

What then?

Writer. Navy SEAL. Columbia University. Dispatches on meaning and hardship. Also figs and dogs.

By Sam Alaimo

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Some years ago I started writing down my reflections and, more importantly, returning to them later. The returning is where everything interesting happened. Problems that had once consumed me sat on the page in full urgency, and I had trouble remembering what the urgency was about. Opinions I no longer held were still there, argued with a confidence I recognized immediately because it was the same confidence I could feel in my current opinions.

Until then, I could tell a story about how I had changed. Everyone can. The pages gave me something to check that story against, and the story did not always survive the check.

You know you were different five years ago. That much is easy. Now try to remember what you expected from the years ahead, back before you knew how they would turn out. Which worry seemed certain to stay with you? What did you assume would matter by now? The honest answer is that you cannot fully get back there. What happened afterward keeps leaking into the memory, tidying it, making your past self a little wiser and a little more consistent with the person doing the remembering.

An old entry has no access to what happened afterward. It preserves what you wrote while the outcome was still unknown, and it may be unfair, overdramatic, or completely mistaken. Even that becomes useful. You can examine the reasoning you used at the time, including the parts you would now prefer to explain a little differently.

Underneath all the ordinary advice about journaling, this is the function I find most interesting. You are building a record that future versions of you can return to, with enough distance to see what was difficult to notice while you were living through it.

The Stoics took writing seriously for practical reasons. Cleanthes was said to have recorded Zeno’s lectures on oyster shells and ox shoulder blades because he could not afford ordinary writing materials. Centuries later, Epictetus urged his students to write down important thoughts and return to them regularly. An insight needed to remain available after the moment in which it first made sense.

Kept long enough, those pages can also reveal something less comfortable. You may find a promise from years ago that sounds almost exactly like one you made last week. Both were sincere. Reading them together raises a question that another fresh burst of determination cannot answer.

Marcus Aurelius kept returning to the same lessons in his own writing. Repetition can be part of learning to live by a principle, and it can also conceal how little we have changed. How do we tell which one we are doing?

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I have been thinking about why a correction can be completely accurate and still fail. We tend to assume that once the facts are on our side, the rest is mostly a matter of saying them clearly. Someone made a mistake. We point it out. If they are reasonable, they acknowledge it and change.

However, human beings rarely make it that easy.

The moment someone feels humiliated, the mistake is no longer the only thing they are dealing with. They are also dealing with the fact that they feel exposed, diminished, or embarrassed in front of someone whose opinion matters to them. If other people are watching, there is now an audience to consider as well. Admitting the mistake may still be the rational thing to do, but it has acquired a social cost that did not need to be there.

You can see how easily this changes a conversation. A person who might have been willing to say, “I got that wrong,” begins explaining why it was understandable, why somebody else contributed, why the mistake was not as serious as you are making it sound. Sometimes we interpret that defensiveness as further proof that the person cannot take criticism. Sometimes that is true. But I think it is worth asking whether the way we delivered the criticism gave them something besides the error to defend.

When admitting mistakes carries the risk of embarrassment or loss of face, people often protect themselves by withdrawing, withholding information, or becoming defensive. Environments where people can acknowledge errors without expecting humiliation tend to make honest discussion and learning easier.

That does not mean truth should be made comfortable. Some truths are uncomfortable by their nature. It means we should be careful about adding discomfort that serves no purpose beyond making sure the other person feels the correction.

Epictetus has a passage in the Discourses that I think gets remarkably close to this. He describes what happens when someone encounters a person who reasons badly. Too often, he says, we become frustrated, ridicule them, call them ignorant, and walk away. He then gives a much better image for what correction is supposed to be:

The image changes the question.

If someone has lost the road, the point of knowing the road is that you can help them find it again. Standing beside the path explaining how foolish they were to get lost may establish your superior sense of direction, but it leaves the original problem untouched.

Epictetus goes on to praise Socrates for the same reason. What he admired was Socrates’s ability to question someone without becoming irritated or abusive, allowing the contradiction in their thinking to become visible through the conversation itself.

There is something useful in that beyond Socratic debate. People are often much more willing to revise a conclusion they have been allowed to examine than one they feel forced to surrender. A question can sometimes do more than a verdict because it gives the other person room to participate in discovering what went wrong.

That does not mean every correction should be disguised as a gentle question. Sometimes the facts are already clear. If someone has treated you badly, missed an important responsibility, or crossed a boundary, there may be nothing useful about pretending you are merely curious. Clarity can be a kindness too.

What matters is whether the correction remains directed toward something that can actually be corrected.

“You interrupted me repeatedly in that meeting, and I need you not to do that again” gives the other person something specific to confront. “You are an arrogant person who has no respect for anyone” asks them to defend an identity. Even when the second statement grows out of genuine frustration, it reaches much further than the behavior we actually needed to address.

Once a correction becomes a judgment of the whole person, admitting the mistake becomes harder because there is more at stake in the admission. Agreeing that I behaved selfishly in one situation is possible. Agreeing that I am, in essence, a selfish person is a very different demand.

Seneca approaches correction from another direction in On Anger. He argues that anger is unnecessary for dealing with wrongdoing and compares correction to medicine. The person correcting an error should be concerned with what will improve the person and the situation, just as a physician is concerned with treating what is wrong rather than becoming personally offended by the illness. Seneca is not asking for softness. He allows discipline and consequences where they are needed. His objection is to the anger that makes punishment satisfying in itself.

I think that distinction is easy to lose when we have been hurt.

Correction can begin with a legitimate purpose and acquire another one along the way. We want the person to understand what they did, but we also want them to feel what they put us through. We want an apology, but perhaps we also want to watch some of their confidence disappear before we accept it. By the time the conversation ends, the original issue may have been addressed, yet we keep going because the emotional account still feels unpaid.

That is often where dignity gets taken unnecessarily.

A person can understand the seriousness of what they did without being humiliated. They can face consequences without being mocked. They can be told something difficult without having the correction performed in front of people who had no reason to be involved.

Of course, privacy is not always possible or appropriate. A public falsehood may require a public correction. Harm done openly may need to be addressed openly so that other people understand what is acceptable. Protecting someone’s dignity cannot mean protecting them from every consequence of their choices.

But even then, there is a difference between making the truth visible and turning someone’s embarrassment into part of the punishment.

That difference becomes especially important in relationships that continue after the correction.

Every time someone tells you about a mistake, they learn something about the price of honesty with you.

A child who admits breaking something notices what happens next. An employee who tells a manager about an error notices whether the admission becomes useful information or ammunition. A friend who says, “I handled that badly,” notices whether the confession lets the two of you move toward repair or simply gives you a better position from which to attack.

Over time, these experiences teach people what they should bring to us and what they should hide.

This is where humiliation becomes more expensive than the moment itself. If every mistake becomes an occasion for ridicule or prolonged shame, people may not become more careful about making mistakes. They may become more careful about letting you see them.

That creates a strange kind of relationship. Everything appears fine because problems arrive late. People tell partial truths. They soften what happened before bringing it to you. They wait until there is no other choice.

The person who believes they have taught everyone around them to be responsible may actually have taught them to become discreet.

There is a much better reputation to have: to be someone people can be wrong in front of.

I do not mean someone who excuses everything. I mean someone whose seriousness can be trusted. If I have made a mistake, I know you will tell me. If I have hurt you, I know you will not pretend otherwise. But I also know that admitting it will not require me to crawl first.

That kind of trust makes correction easier because the person does not need to spend half the conversation protecting themselves from you.

And there is another reason to practice this that has little to do with whether the other person changes.

Being right places us in a small position of power.

For that moment, we know something they do not, see something they missed, or have a stronger claim than they do. It may be a trivial advantage, but advantage has a way of revealing character. What do we do when someone cannot answer back convincingly? What do we take once we have already established the point?

The Stoic concern eventually returns to us.

Epictetus warns that abusive words strengthen an abusive character just as repeated actions strengthen any other habit. We are always practicing something in the way we respond.

If someone else has behaved badly, correcting them may be our responsibility. Humiliating them is another action altogether, and that action belongs to our character.

Perhaps that is why leaving someone with their dignity matters even when they have done nothing to earn our kindness in the moment. We are not only deciding what they deserve. We are deciding what kind of person we will practice being while we have the upper hand.

Say what needs to be said. Make the boundary clear. Let consequences follow when they should.

Then, when the truth has done its work, know when to stop.

The mistake may belong to them.

There is no reason their dignity has to belong to you too.

Stay stoic,

SW

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My ebook STOIC CONFIDENCE has been received incredibly well since its release. I’ve had many readers message me to say that it helped them rethink their relationship with fear, self-doubt, and confidence, and hearing that has meant a lot to me.

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Somewhere past the middle of a bad day, the day can stop being a day and start feeling like evidence about your life.

The tiredness that belonged to this afternoon begins to say something about your career. One rejection starts shaping what you expect from the future. An evening of loneliness reaches much further than the evening itself. Nothing necessarily changed in the facts. We simply began drawing much larger conclusions from them.

You can sometimes hear that shift in the language we use.

Today was difficult becomes everything has been difficult lately.

I feel lost becomes I have no idea what I am doing with my life.

This did not work becomes nothing I try ever works.

At first we stay close to what we actually know. Then we make claims about months, years, sometimes an entire future. Words like always, never, everything, and nothing allow a judgment formed in one moment to speak for far more of our life than it can really account for.

This is one reason I like the image of low tide.

If you had never seen the sea before and arrived at the shore after the water had pulled back, much of what you observed would be true. The boats really would be sitting lower. The mud really would be exposed. The water really would be far from where it had been.

Your mistake would begin when you tried to understand the whole ocean from that single moment.

Nobody familiar with the coast needs to deny what is in front of them. They simply know that what they are seeing now is one state of something larger.

We have much less difficulty remembering that about the sea than about ourselves.

A bad state changes what comes easily to mind. When you are disappointed, old disappointments are easier to remember. When you feel behind, every delay and unfinished ambition suddenly seems important. When you are lonely, the mind rarely gives equal attention to all the periods in which you felt loved, connected, and understood.

The conclusion can therefore feel remarkably well supported. You are not merely miserable. You can point to reasons.

That is where I think the Stoics become useful.

Epictetus made a distinction between an impression and our decision to accept it as true.

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An impression appears quickly and often feels convincing before we have had much chance to examine it. His advice was to slow that process down and ask what has actually happened before agreeing with everything the first impression seems to suggest.

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