Horace exhorts Lollius, exhorts himself, exhorts us, to shift our attention from those compulsions toward questions that really and always matter—“Where is it virtue comes from?”—because even by just exploring those questions, even if we fail to answer them, we’re pushing back against the tyranny of everyday anxieties. We’re resisting, or evading, the stresses that a condition of always-on connectivity inevitably brings to us, in large part because when we are so connected we are constantly driven to compare ourselves to others who have made better choices than we have.
