When I started experimenting with a simplified lifestyle, it took some getting used to. When, for example, someone asked me where I had gotten the T-shirt I was wearing and I answered that I had bought it at a thrift store, I found myself feeling a bit ashamed. This incident made me appreciate Cato’s manner of dealing with such feelings. Cato, as we have seen, dressed differently as a kind of training exercise: He wanted to teach himself “to be ashamed only of what was really shameful.” He therefore went out of his way to do things that would trigger inappropriate feelings of shame in himself,
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