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There exists, one notices, a particular quality in certain people—a stillness, almost, though not the stillness of indifference. Rather, it is the stillness of someone who has learned to distinguish between the waves on the surface and the depths below. They move through the world unbothered by the small turbulences that send others reeling, not because they feel less, but because they have understood something essential about where to place their attention.
The ancient Stoics grasped this truth with remarkable clarity. They observed how human beings exhaust themselves pursuing phantoms, how we spend our precious hours wrestling with shadows while the substance of life slips quietly past. Marcus Aurelius, writing in his private journals between military campaigns, Epictetus, who had known slavery before philosophy, Seneca, navigating the treacherous court of Nero—each arrived at the same conclusion through different doors. We suffer most, they recognized, not from what happens to us, but from our thoughts about what happens to us. The rain falls on everyone. Only some choose to stand there arguing with the sky.
What draws people to these ideas now, across such distance of time, is their curious practicality. One need not abandon the world or assume any particular posture of austerity. The work lies elsewhere—in noticing where your energy goes and whether it returns anything of value. There are ten particular ways we squander our days, ten holes through which our vitality drains away. To see them clearly is already halfway to being free of them.
Table of Contents
1. They Don't Waste Time on Other People's Opinions
One observes, rather quickly in life, how much energy disappears into the vast space of worrying what others think. It becomes a kind of background hum, this constant measuring of oneself against imagined judgments. The Stoics understood that this was perhaps the most exhausting game one could play, because the rules keep changing and the judges never stop multiplying. Epictetus put it plainly: some things are up to us, and some things are not. What another person thinks of you falls entirely into the second category. You might be the ripest peach in the orchard, and still someone will prefer apples. To spend your days trying to change their mind is to forget that you have peaches to grow.
The freedom in this realization ripples outward in unexpected ways. When you stop performing for an invisible audience, you can finally hear your own voice. The Stoics practiced this not through arrogance but through a kind of clear-sighted humility. They knew that others would judge them—perhaps harshly, perhaps unfairly. But they also knew that those judgments said more about the person making them than about the person being judged. Your responsibility lies in acting according to your values, in doing work that feels true to you. What happens after that—the praise, the criticism, the misunderstanding—belongs to the world, not to you. And there is something deeply restful in setting that burden down.
2. They Don't Waste Time on Things Beyond Their Control
There is a simple test the Stoics would apply to any situation that caused distress, and it goes like this: Can I do anything about this? If the answer is yes, then worry transforms into action—you make a plan, you take a step, you do what is yours to do. But if the answer is no, if the thing lies entirely outside your reach, then worry becomes nothing more than a way to torture yourself with your own thoughts. The weather will not change because you fret about it. The past will not rewrite itself because you replay it endlessly in your mind. Traffic exists whether you clench your jaw or breathe slowly. The Stoics saw this distinction as the foundation of all peace.
What makes this practice so challenging is that our minds are remarkably skilled at blurring the line between the two categories. We tell ourselves that worrying is a form of caring, that anxiety is preparation, that replaying old conversations might somehow change their outcome. But the Stoics would gently suggest otherwise. They would ask you to notice how much of your day disappears into rehearsing speeches you will never give, imagining disasters that will never arrive, or wishing circumstances were different than they are. That energy, once redirected, could build something real. It could deepen a friendship, improve your work, or simply allow you to be present for the small, unrepeatable moments that make up a life. The choice, always, is whether to spend yourself on shadows or substance.
3. They Don't Waste Time on Resentment and Grudges
The mind, one discovers, has a curious tendency to return to old wounds like a tongue seeking out a sore tooth. We replay the moment someone wronged us, rehearse what we should have said, imagine the apology we will never receive. The Stoics observed that this habit—this carrying of resentment—is rather like drinking poison and expecting the other person to suffer. The one who wronged you has likely moved on, forgotten the incident entirely perhaps, while you remain locked in a cell of your own making. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself daily that holding onto anger was a choice, not a necessity, and that each moment spent in bitterness was a moment stolen from living.
What the Stoics proposed instead was not forgiveness in the sentimental sense, but something more practical and self-interested. They suggested that resentment exhausts you far more than it punishes anyone else. When you nurse a grudge, you invite that person to occupy space in your mind rent-free, to influence your mood, to color your present moment with their past actions. The Stoic approach asks: Why would you grant them such power? The events have already occurred. You cannot unspill the milk. But you can decide whether to stand there staring at it or to clean it up and move forward. This is not about being soft or permissive. It is about recognizing that your inner peace is too valuable to be held hostage by someone else’s behavior. The past may be fixed, but your relationship to it remains fluid, changeable, yours.
4. They Don't Waste Time on Perfection
There is a particular kind of paralysis that comes from waiting until everything is exactly right, and the Stoics recognized it as one of the more insidious ways we avoid actually living. Perfection, they understood, is not a standard but a trap—a moving target that ensures you never quite arrive. One polishes and revises and hesitates, telling oneself that soon, when conditions align just so, then the real work will begin, then the real life will start. But conditions never align perfectly. The weather is always slightly wrong, the timing never quite ideal, and meanwhile the days accumulate into years of preparation for a moment that never comes.
The Stoics practiced something they called “the discipline of action,” which meant doing what needed doing with whatever materials were at hand. Seneca wrote essays while in exile. Epictetus taught philosophy as a former slave with a permanent limp. Marcus Aurelius led an empire while suffering chronic illness and wrote his meditations in a military tent, not a quiet study. None of them waited for perfect circumstances because they grasped something essential: good enough, done now, is infinitely more valuable than perfect, done never. This does not mean rushing or being careless. It means understanding that growth happens through action, through making mistakes and adjusting course, not through endless contemplation of the ideal path. The sculpture emerges through many small, imperfect chisel strikes, not through one perfect blow that never lands.
5. They Don't Waste Time on Comparing Themselves to Others
The human tendency to measure oneself against others runs deep, and the Stoics watched how this impulse drained vitality from even the most accomplished people. You glance at a neighbor’s success and suddenly your own achievements feel smaller. Someone else’s relationship looks effortless while yours requires work. A colleague receives praise and somehow it dims your own light. This constant measuring creates a peculiar kind of suffering because the comparison never ends—there is always someone richer, more talented, more beautiful, more at ease. The race has no finish line, and yet we exhaust ourselves running it.
What the Stoics offered instead was the radical notion that your only worthy competitor is the person you were yesterday. Seneca wrote about this extensively, noting how absurd it was to judge your journey by someone else’s map when you are traveling entirely different terrain. You do not know what advantages they started with, what struggles they hide, what sacrifices they made that you would never choose. More importantly, their path has nothing to do with yours. Your work is to become more patient than you were last month, more skilled than you were last year, more aligned with your values than you were yesterday. This inward focus is not narcissism but clarity. It frees you to celebrate others genuinely, because their success no longer threatens yours. And it allows you to measure progress by standards that actually matter—your own growth, your own integrity, your own steady movement toward the person you hope to become.
6. They Don't Waste Time on Complaining
There exists a subtle distinction between acknowledging a problem and dwelling in complaint, and the Stoics spent considerable energy helping people see the difference. Complaining, they noticed, has a seductive quality—it feels like you are doing something about the situation when in fact you are simply rehearsing your dissatisfaction. You tell one person about the terrible service, then another, then a third, and with each retelling the story grows sharper, more dramatic, and you feel momentarily validated. But the situation itself remains unchanged. The traffic still crawled. The meal was still cold. The weather was still dreary. All you have done is spread the negative experience across more of your day, invited it to occupy more space in your consciousness.
The Stoic approach does not demand that you pretend everything is wonderful when it is not. Rather, it asks you to notice when complaining has crossed the line from useful venting into useless rumination. If something can be fixed, fix it. If it cannot be fixed, accept it and redirect your attention elsewhere. Marcus Aurelius developed a practice of asking himself whether his complaining changed the reality of the situation or merely his experience of it, and the answer was almost always the latter. This is why the Stoics spoke so often about choosing your response. The cold meal happened. That is a fact. But whether you let it poison your entire evening, whether you carry that irritation home and snap at your family, whether you replay it for days in conversations—these are choices. And each time you choose complaint over acceptance, you hand away a small piece of your peace.
7. They Don't Waste Time on Regret About the Past
The past has this peculiar weight to it, doesn’t it? It sits there in memory, unchangeable yet somehow still demanding our attention, our revision, our endless what-ifs. The Stoics noticed how people could spend years trapped in conversations with ghosts, replaying decisions that cannot be unmade, wishing they had taken the other road, the other job, said yes instead of no or no instead of yes. Epictetus was particularly direct about this tendency. He would point out that you cannot pour new wine into a broken cup, cannot plant seeds in last season’s field. The past is finished. It has already become what it became. Your regret does not reach backward through time to change anything. It only reaches forward to diminish your present.
This does not mean the Stoics advocated forgetting or refusing to learn from mistakes. Quite the opposite, actually. They believed in examining the past the way a doctor examines a wound—carefully, honestly, but with the clear purpose of healing and moving forward. Seneca suggested a nightly practice of reviewing your day, not to beat yourself up over errors, but to understand them and adjust your course. The difference lies in the quality of attention. Are you studying the past to extract wisdom, or are you punishing yourself with it? One leads to growth. The other leads to paralysis. The Stoics understood that you are not the same person now who made those choices then. You have learned, changed, accumulated new understanding. To judge your past self by your present knowledge is both unfair and unproductive. Better to acknowledge what was, accept what is, and use whatever clarity you have gained to shape what comes next.
8. They Don't Waste Time on Anxiety About the Future
The mind has a remarkable capacity to leap forward into time, spinning elaborate scenarios of disaster that have not occurred and may never occur. You lie awake constructing detailed narratives of job loss, illness, rejection, failure—each story so vivid it produces the same racing heart and tight chest as if the event were actually unfolding. The Stoics observed this tendency with great interest because they recognized it as perhaps the most common form of self-inflicted suffering. We rehearse tragedies that exist only in imagination, and in doing so, we experience the pain of events that may never come to pass. As Seneca noted, we suffer more in imagination than in reality.
What the Stoics practiced instead was a curious technique they called negative visualization, though it worked quite differently than anxious worrying. Rather than spiraling into catastrophic thinking, they would calmly contemplate challenges that might arise and consider how they would respond. This is not the same as anxiety. Anxiety is frantic and unfocused, a churning storm of what-ifs that leaves you depleted. The Stoic practice is calm and purposeful—you look at a potential difficulty, acknowledge it clearly, and then ask yourself how you would handle it with dignity and reason if it occurred. Often, you discover that even the scenarios you fear most would not destroy you. You would find a way through, just as you have found your way through every difficulty that has come before. This realization does not prevent challenges, but it strips them of their power to terrorize you in advance. The future remains uncertain, as it always has been and always will be. But you need not live there.
9. They Don't Waste Time on Material Excess
There is a curious phenomenon the Stoics observed about possessions: the more you accumulate, the more you must maintain, protect, worry over, and eventually the things you own begin to own you. They watched wealthy Romans exhaust themselves acquiring villas and artworks and fine clothing, always believing the next purchase would finally bring satisfaction, only to find the hunger renewed almost immediately. Marcus Aurelius, who lived in a palace and could have had anything he desired, wrote repeatedly in his journals about how little he actually needed, how most of what surrounded him was unnecessary weight. The Stoics were not advocating poverty for its own sake, but rather questioning the unexamined assumption that more possessions equal more happiness.
What they discovered through practice was that simplicity creates a particular kind of freedom. When you need less, you are less vulnerable to loss. When you desire less, disappointment has fewer places to take root. This does not mean living in deprivation or denying yourself pleasure. It means being honest about what genuinely adds value to your life versus what you acquired out of habit, status anxiety, or the vague hope that this purchase would somehow fill an unnamed emptiness. Seneca, who was quite wealthy, distinguished between using money wisely and being used by it. He suggested periodically living with very little—simple meals, modest clothing, basic comforts—not as punishment but as practice, a way of proving to yourself that you could be perfectly content with less. Once you know this in your bones, once you have tested it and found it true, then material circumstances lose their power to disturb your peace. You can have things or not have them, and either way, you remain fundamentally yourself.
10. They Don't Waste Time on Seeking External Validation
There develops, over time, a kind of addiction to approval—the need to hear that you are doing well, that you are valued, that you matter. And the Stoics watched how this need turns people into performers, constantly adjusting their behavior based on the perceived expectations of an audience that may not even be watching. You make decisions not because they feel right to you, but because you hope they will impress someone else. You shape your opinions to match the room. You measure your worth by likes, promotions, compliments, invitations. But approval from others is remarkably unstable ground on which to build a sense of self. It shifts with mood and circumstance. What pleased them yesterday bores them today. The applause fades quickly, and you are left hungry again.
What the Stoics cultivated instead was an internal sense of worth that did not require constant external confirmation. They spoke often about living according to nature, by which they meant living according to reason and virtue rather than the fluctuating opinions of the crowd. This does not mean becoming isolated or indifferent to feedback. It means developing a core that remains steady regardless of whether others approve. Epictetus taught his students to ask themselves each evening whether they had acted with integrity, courage, kindness, wisdom. If the answer was yes, that was sufficient. If the answer was no, they could adjust course the next day. But nowhere in this accounting did he suggest looking to others to tell you whether you had done well. You know, in the quiet moments when you are alone with yourself, whether you are living according to your values. That knowledge, the Stoics believed, is the only validation that truly sustains you.
FAQs
Not at all. Stoicism teaches you to feel emotions fully but not be controlled by them. It’s about choosing your response rather than reacting blindly.
Absolutely. Stoicism offers practical tools specifically for managing anxiety—like focusing only on what you control and accepting what you cannot change.
It’s a lifelong practice, not a destination. You’ll notice small shifts within weeks, but the real transformation unfolds gradually through daily application.
Yes, very much so. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy actually draws heavily from Stoic principles. They complement each other beautifully in practice.
Of course. Stoics pursue goals passionately but hold outcomes lightly. They focus on effort and integrity rather than results they cannot guarantee.
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