Misjudgment Is the Real Misery

It's possible that most human misery comes down to one thing: misjudgment. Not bad luck, not bad circumstances, just misjudgment about what those circumstances mean. The way we judge what happens to us is what pulls us away from living in accord with nature and away from our highest good.

I've been sitting with this idea for a few weeks now, working through Sellars's book on Stoicism, and it keeps showing up in different forms. The Stoics believed the raw event or the impression that comes to us and the meaning we attach to it are two separate things. You get punched in the face by a weak old man on drugs outside of a 7-Eleven in Bangkok. That's the event. "This is terrible" is a judgment layered on top of it, and it's the judgment, not the punch from a weak old man on drugs, that creates the panic. The more weight we put on what happens to us, the further we drift into chaos. Take the judgment away and the event just sits there, neutral, asking nothing of us. The punch still stings. The Stoics were never claiming pain isn't real. They were claiming pain isn't bad, not in the moral sense. It's an indifferent, same as everything else that happens to the body. The suffering comes from the story stacked on top of the sting, not the sting itself.

What strikes me is how much effort this actually takes. It's not a passive shrug at life. The Stoics weren't telling you to stop noticing what happens. They were telling you to catch yourself in the act of adding value to it, and to question whether that value was ever yours to add in the first place. That's a discipline, not a mood. I still remember a story about this guy named Raffaele who once told me he got punched in the face outside of a 7-Eleven in Thailand and it didn't hurt so he just smiled back at the guy and said that's all you got. He's also a professional boxer with a record you can find on BoxRec. It's one of the best examples of control over a chaotic situation that I know.

But this is where the Stoics land on indifference, and it's the part people get wrong most often. Treating something as indifferent doesn't mean not caring. The Stoics still preferred health over sickness and safety over danger. Anyone would. What they refused to do was tie their happiness to which one they actually got. Preferred, not necessary. That's the whole distinction, and it's a hard one to actually live by, especially when the thing on the other side of the judgment is something you actually want.

I think about this constantly with training and with betting. A bad round or a losing week is just an event until I decide what it means about me. If I judge it as proof I'm slipping, the weight of that judgment does more damage than the loss itself ever could. The Stoics would say the meaning is optional. The event isn't.

That's the practice, as far as I can tell. Not eliminating what happens to you, not pretending you don't have preferences, just refusing to hand the outcome power over your peace. Negative shit happens all the time to us. What you do with the judgment is the only part that was ever up to you.