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We react to our judgments and opinions – to our thoughts about things, not to things themselves.
We should stake our well-being on what we can control and let go of attachment to what we cannot.
Stoicism therefore means applying one’s imagination to developments that seem unwelcome and using them as a kind of building material. The Stoic takes whatever happens and puts it to use.
The first principle of practical Stoicism is this: we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us.
If any external thing causes you distress, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it. And this you have the power to eliminate now.
The Stoic claim, in other words, is that our pleasures, griefs, desires and fears all involve three stages rather than two: not just an event and a reaction, but an event, then a judgment or opinion about it, and then a reaction (to the judgment or opinion). Our task is to notice the middle step, to understand its frequent irrationality, and to control it through the patient use of reason.
Stoicism means to help us think better about our thinking, to teach the mind to understand the mind, to make the fish more aware of the water.
We always feel as though we react to things in the world; in fact we react to things in ourselves. And sometimes changing ourselves will be more effective and sensible than trying to change the world.
Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things.
HAMLET: … There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2, 2
Take away your opinion about it, and “I have been harmed” is taken away. Take away “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.7
How easy a thing it is to push away every thought that is disturbing or out of place, and to be at once in perfect peace. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.2
The goal of the Stoic, though, is not to empty the mind, but to clear it of foolishness and misjudgment.
When pleasures have corrupted both mind and body, nothing seems to be tolerable – not because the suffering is hard, but because the sufferer is soft. For why are we thrown into a rage by somebody’s cough or sneeze, by negligence in chasing a fly away, by a dog that gets in the way, or by the dropping of a key that has slipped from the hands of a careless servant? Seneca, On Anger 2.25.3
The Stoics start by comparing our own reactions to similar things in different circumstances, thus demonstrating that the reactions aren’t inevitable even in ourselves.
What is it, then, that doesn’t offend your eyes in public but upsets them at home – other than your opinion, which in the one place is easygoing and tolerant, but at home is critical and always complaining? Seneca, On Anger 3.35.5
Those things with respect to which everyone is weak, we regard as hard and beyond endurance. We forget what a torment it is to many of us just to abstain from wine or be made to get up at daybreak. These things are not essentially difficult. It is we who are soft and slack. Seneca, Epistles 71.23
Things are not that difficult or painful in themselves. Our weakness and cowardice make them so.
They usually suggest viewing a thing as small, as unimportant, as something to which we should rise superior; and one can have any or all of this without the overtones of vituperation and dislike.
