Today’s letter is adapted from Michael’s new pieces on Stoic Practice. Listen to the rest in the Stoa app.
Stoicism is a philosophy of life. It is not a theory, but a craft. Something to be practiced, trained, improved over time.
Every craft has a target. The carpenter aims to build well. The writer, to write well. The runner, to run well. The Stoic aims to live well: to navigate the challenges of life with skill and calm, to behave in an admirable way, to make the most of the opportunities presented to them, and to treat other people as they deserve.
If we look at these other crafts, we see that they are split into different domains. Athletes train their technique, their body, and their mind. A carpenter trains their technique, but also their ability to plan a job, to understand what a space requires, to know what makes one material better than another. A writer refines the quality of their sentences, but also their ability to do research, to imagine different worlds.
Crafts have different parts, and the best practitioners excel at all of them.
Stoicism divides itself into three disciplines - the three areas to train if you want to put Stoicism into practice. The disciplines of judgement, desire and action.
These are how to think, how to want, and how to act.
To be a good Stoic, you have to have all three at the same time. They are mutually reinforcing.
Today, let’s focus on the discipline of judgement - because if you can’t think well, then you are always vulnerable. Without a disciplined mind, any stressful situation can throw you off track and ruin your progress. Any compelling-sounding lie can mislead you.
Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome and a practicing Stoic, wrote in the Meditations:
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts; therefore guard accordingly.
Meditations, 3.9
This is a key Stoic idea. How you feel, and how you live, depend on how you think. Your stress comes from how you think. Your emotions too. How you interpret the world, including the stories you tell about yourself, determines every choice you make.
If you can improve your thinking, you can improve your life.
The Stoics taught that life comes to us in a series of impressions. When someone cuts us off in traffic, our boss gives a difficult piece of feedback or our friend doesn’t call us back, we have an impression of the world.
But, we don’t need to agree with that impression. We don’t have to take the world as it appears to us. Between impression and belief, there is a space, a gap. And in that gap we have a choice about what to believe, about the story we tell.
Maybe the person who cut me off in traffic was not selfish, but late. Maybe my boss’s feedback could actually be helpful to me. Maybe my friend just forgot to call me back, and it doesn’t mean anything about our friendship.
This is not just about small annoyances. The Stoics taught that our entire lives are made up of how we deal with impressions, how we think. Epictetus, a Stoic teacher and former slave, said to his students:
The Iliad is nothing else than appearance and the use of appearances. It appeared to Paris to carry off the wife of Menelaus: it appeared to Helene to follow him. If then it had appeared to Menelaus to feel that it was a gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also.
Epictetus, Discourses 1.28.12–13
For Epictetus, the entirety of Homer’s epic poems comes down to how well, or poorly, those heroes handled their impressions of the world. Change your interpretation, and you change history. It is not a small task we are talking about.
The discipline of judgement is about changing how we think to shape a good life. When we realize the quality of our lives comes from the quality of our thoughts, we can take accountability for how we feel and what we do.
The Stoics also taught, thousands of years before modern neuroscience found evidence to support it, that our emotions also follow from how we think. We are anxious because we judge something outside of our control might hurt us. We are angry because we have told ourselves a story, one where we are the victim, where we have been harmed.
But we have the power to change that story. As Marcus Aurelius said:
Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.
Meditations, 4.7
In the space between impression and belief, we have the freedom to choose the story, to interrogate our first impression. And if we can change our impression to something that is more helpful and more truthful, then we can change our emotions for the better.
Let’s end the lesson with a quick example of a Stoic exercise in the discipline of judgement.
The Stoics taught that when we have an impression of the world, it tends to arrive in two parts. First, there is the fact of the matter, then there is a value judgement. A story about what that fact means.
One way to think better, more clearly, is to practice never adding a value judgement automatically.
According to the Stoics, there is a fact that someone has talked behind your back. But the idea that you were wronged was added by you. So, it is up to you to make sure these value judgements are tested, true and helpful.
So if you want to be more Stoic, start with that. Just don’t add a value judgement right away. Describe the fact of the matter alone. This won’t come easily, but it is a skill we can practice. Like the athlete trains their body or the carpenter builds their skill, Stoics train their attention.
Mindfulness, at its simplest, just means being aware of what is filling your mind. If we can build that awareness, we can increase the space between how things seem to be, and what we truly believe. We can give ourselves more time to decide what we want to believe. That’s why Stoa is designed with mindful meditation as a key part of Stoic practice, so you can get better at catching your impressions and value judgements before they become beliefs.
First, you notice how you think, then you can improve it.
And how you think determines how you live, so every judgement matters.
The Stoics—and not just Sir Karl Popper—are predecessors of George Soros; for the latter, errors in thinking demonstrate our fallibility, and our misconceptions can play a role in our own lives, as well as—depending on our rank—in the unfolding of history. The solution?
No unexamined representation is worth believing or disbelieving; otherwise, error and unhappiness are possible.