What Is a Judgment?
On the boundary between perception and interpretation
Your child forgets to call you on your birthday. The phone stays silent all day. You check it repeatedly. Nothing. By evening, you’re hurt, angry, constructing elaborate narratives about what this means. They don’t value you. You’ve failed as a parent. The relationship is damaged in ways you didn’t realize.
The next morning they call, mortified. Their phone died at work and they didn’t realize until late. They’d been planning to call all day.
What changed between evening and morning? The event remained identical: they didn’t call on your birthday. Your suffering dissolved instantly, completely. But if the event caused your suffering, and the event didn’t change, where did the suffering actually live?
The Stoics have a brutal answer: it lived entirely in your judgment about what the missed call meant. The event was neutral. Your interpretation made it painful. And you suffered a full day from an interpretation you constructed in seconds and never questioned until new information forced you to revise it.
This sounds almost insulting. You weren’t making things up. You were responding reasonably to the information you had. Someone who cares about you should remember your birthday. When they don’t call, that signals something. You were reading the signal, not inventing it.
But were you? What signal actually existed? A phone that didn’t ring. Everything else was meaning you added so quickly it felt like direct perception. The signal contained no information about intention, about value, about your relationship. You supplied all of that. Then you experienced your own additions as if they were messages the event was sending you.
This is what the Stoics meant by judgment. Not just obvious opinions or conscious evaluations, but the constant stream of interpretation you’re adding to raw experience without noticing you’re adding anything at all. The meaning that feels like it’s already there in events, already baked into what happened, when actually it’s something you’re creating and projecting so rapidly that perception and interpretation blur into a single experience.
If you could see the boundary between what happens and what you think it means, you could examine whether your interpretations serve you. But the boundary is nearly invisible. Meaning arrives already attached to events. You don’t experience “phone didn’t ring” followed by separate moment of deciding what that means. You experience “being forgotten,” “being devalued,” “relationship damage.” The interpretation and the event feel like one thing.
Seneca compared this to how we experience our own thoughts. You don’t notice thought-formation. You notice already-formed thoughts appearing in consciousness as if from nowhere. By the time you’re aware of thinking something, the thinking has already happened. Similarly, by the time you’re aware of an event’s meaning, you’ve already interpreted it. The judgment has already occurred. You’re experiencing its result, not its formation.
This makes judgments nearly impossible to catch. You’re always arriving after they’ve formed, experiencing their output, not their process. To work with judgment, you’d need to somehow observe interpretation while it’s happening, catch meaning in the act of being created. But consciousness seems to lack that capacity. We experience results, not formation.
So how did the Stoics suggest examining something that happens too fast and too automatically to observe?
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The rest of this essay explores how to hold your experiences lightly versus tightly, what Epictetus taught students about separating events from interpretations, how Marcus Aurelius practiced catching false certainty in real time, the sophisticated self-deception that makes judgments invisible, and the specific techniques for finding the boundary between what actually happened and what you added to what happened.