Your Opinions Aren't Observations, They're Demands

You form hundreds of opinions a day. About the news, about your colleagues, about the person in front of you in the queue. They feel automatic, like seeing. But they are not observations. They are tiny laws you are writing inside your own skull, and then you have to enforce them.

Marcus Aurelius buried one of his best lines in Book Six of the Meditations: it is in your power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in your soul. In this episode I unpack what that means in practice. Not suppressing your reactions, but noticing the gap between an impression and a judgement, and choosing not to legislate.

You will walk away with one question to ask yourself this week when an opinion forms: does this need legislating?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

I want to talk to you about something that Marcus Aurelius wrote, and I think it might be the most underrated line in all of Stoicism. So it's not the famous one about the obstacle is the way, the impediment to action advances action. It's the one about time being like a river. It's tucked away in book six of the Meditations, quite easy to miss, and it says this. It is in your power to have no opinion about a thing and not to be disturbed in your soul. It is in your power to have no opinion about a thing. When I first read that, I thought, well, I thought it was a bit odd, honestly. Having opinions and thinking about stuff feels like breathing. It's what human beings are meant to do. You don't choose them, they just happen. Someone cuts you off in traffic, and then you have an opinion about that person. Your colleague sends you a passive-aggressive email, and you have 17 opinions about it before you've even finished reading. Opinions come to us automatically, just feels like seeing. But here's the thing that I've come to understand the more I've thought about this, and it's changed the way I move through my day. Our opinions are not observations, they're more like demands. Think about what actually happens when you form an opinion. You see something, right? Your colleague gets promoted. Let's say mm that happens, and within half a second you've produced a judgment that should have been me. They don't deserve it. Management are idiots. Now, does any of that describe what actually happened? Not really. What happened is someone got promoted. That's it. The rest, every bit of it, is just sort of legislation you're passing inside your own skull. Tiny laws about how things should be, who deserves what, and how the world ought to work. And the thing about laws is that once you've passed them, you have to enforce them. And that's where suffering exists. It's not the event, but the gap between what happened and what your opinion says should have happened. Epictetus had a word for this first flash of a reaction. He called it fantasia, so it means an impression if you're new to Stoicism. This is the raw data you you have before you do anything with it. And the Stoics were obsessed with this tiny sliver of time between receiving the impression and then adding your judgment to that impression. Because in that tiny gap, that's where you can learn to be free. And that's the gap Marcus is pointing at when he says that it's in your power. You don't have to legislate and endorse it. This would be giving a cent, the Stoics would say. So I tested this the other day, nothing dramatic, a normal, slightly irritating day, and I was in a queue, a long queue. A window was open, and the person at the front was having what appeared to be a full financial consultation. I wanted to buy an adapter to actually record this podcast. And I caught it, right? There was this flood of micro opinions. This is ridiculous. Why don't they open another kiosk? That person has no awareness of other people. This is a terrible system. I'm going to be late. I have to postpone my recording for another day. And each one of those felt like a fact. But none of them really were. They were more like demands. I was demanding that the queue be shorter. I was demanding that the staff work faster. I was demanding that the person in front of me be someone other than who they were with a problem other than what they had. So I caught it with prosoke, this is sort of stoic mindfulness and attention to the thoughts that we're having. And I just stopped. I didn't suppress myself, that's a different thing. I didn't shove the opinions down or tell myself, don't think that or think something else. I just noticed them and I chose not to sign them into an official law. And it was a strange feeling. It was like putting down something heavy, something heavy that I didn't realize I was carrying until I put it down. And the cue was the same length. The person was still chatting. Nothing about the situation changed, except me. I felt genuinely lighter, I felt more freedom. Now, I want to be careful here because this is not the same thing as having no standards, no values, or not caring about anything. Marcus Aurelius was not a nihilist who thought that life had no meaning and who cares. He ran an empire. He made decisions all day long. The difference is between judgments that serve action and judgments that just make you miserable and don't actually help in any objective way. This policy is causing harm and I need to change it. That's a useful opinion. It leads somewhere. The barrister got my order wrong and this is unacceptable, that's you declaring war on a latte. It leads to a slightly worse mourning. So one way to think about stoicism and emotions is that Stoics felt emotions, or the Stoic sage, we'll use the example of the perfect stoic, they felt emotions, but about the right things. And they didn't get caught up and worried and anxious about the things that w when they examined them under the light of reason, they discovered were not worth worrying about in the first place. Most of your opinions, you'll find if you examine them, are the second kind, and mine too. I'd estimate that about ninety percent of the judgments that I form on any given day are mostly useless. They don't help me act, they don't protect me, they don't improve anything. They just churn, and they churn all day long. About the news, about what someone said, about the weather, about the thing that our partner does with the cupboard doors, about who did or didn't clean the dishes, about our own level of competence, whether we should doubt ourselves or not doubt ourselves, and why we're even here at all. What is the meaning of life? We think we're seeing the world clearly, but half the time we're just standing in a room full of demands that we wrote ourselves, wondering why am I so exhausted? So here's the invitation for this week. This is the practice just for this week. When you notice an opinion forming about a person, a situation, the traffic, the news, whatever, ask yourself one question. Does this need legislating? Do I need to turn this into a law? And if the answer is yes, if it leads to a meaningful action, then by all means form the judgment and act on it. But if the answer is no, if it's just another demand you're making of a universe that was never consulting you in the first place, just put it down. That is in your power. That's the reframe. Opinions aren't how you see reality, they're tiny laws you're writing, and most of the time they're making your life worse, not better. Marcus Aurelius figured this out while running an empire during a plague. The least we can do is try it in a queue, in a post office or supermarket. And I'm gonna read that quote one more time and leave it with you. It is in your power to have no opinion about a thing and not to be disturbed in your soul. Go well, my friends.