Who are you trying to impress?
On the opinions of those we don't respect
I remember once reading an interview with David Foster Wallace, author of the famous and excellent book Infinite Jest. The journalist asked him if he was proud of all the awards Infinite Jest had won after years of working as a relatively obscure author. In response Wallace spoke to a paradox.
The paradox was that in order to become a successful author, Wallace had to inundate himself from the desire to win awards. He had created these mental justifications for why awards don’t matter: Those that judge the awards don’t know what they are talking about; the game is rigged and political; who wins awards is random; real authors don’t care about awards.
To survive the challenge of being a struggling writer he had adopted these paradigms. And now that has written this great book, and received these awards, he is not able to enjoy them. He no longer desires them the way a fresh young David Foster Wallace might have.
Some might say that these were survival mechanisms, borne out of a need for psychological protection. Others would say David was naturally moving towards a truth.
Discourses book 1, chapter 21 is about how we measure success. True philosophers measure success internally. They don’t want things outside of themselves.
But many of us try to impress people. We strut around. We show off. We want to be admired. We want other people to comment on how successful we are.
There are two things wrong with this. First, you are placing success externally, which makes you vulnerable. It breaks the idea of the dichotomy of control.
But there is an important second risk: you are letting people who are not qualified be the measure of success. This is not a job they have earned. They don’t practice philosophy, they don’t have the authority to measure success as well as you do.
As Epictetus says about the philosopher who shows off:
Who are they by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not those of whom you are used to say, that they are mad? Well then do you wish to be admired by madmen?
You should not need to be admired. That is not the metric of success for a philosopher. But if you do look for feedback, make sure it is from people who have authority, people whose character you actually want to emulate.
If David Foster Wallace’s approach to awards has validity, it is because it gets close to this Stoic idea: we shouldn’t care about the opinions of people we don’t respect.