Your Opinions Aren't Observations, They're Demands
About this episode
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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