“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.4
Marcus catches something here that most self-help content spends hundreds of pages circling without naming.
We say we love ourselves. We act like we love ourselves — we protect our comfort, our time (sometimes), our resources. But the moment someone forms an opinion about us, all of that collapses and we spend enormous energy trying to manage what is happening in their heads. A place we cannot access, cannot control, and often cannot accurately read.
The irony is almost funny when you name it directly. I am more concerned with what you think of me than with what I actually think of me. I will contort my behavior to manage your perception while neglecting the internal life that actually determines the quality of my days.
Epictetus had a name for this category of things — other people’s opinions sit firmly in the “not up to us” column. You cannot control them. You can influence them, but you cannot determine them. And the attempt to control what is not yours to control is the beginning of a particular kind of misery.
Paul puts a sharper point on it. “Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.” — Galatians 1:10
That is not an argument for not caring what anyone thinks. It is an argument for ordering the caring correctly. There is an audience that matters. Stoicism cannot tell you who that is. Christianity can.
Make sure you know which one it is.
The other minds — what they contain, what they conclude about you — are not yours to manage. Let them go. Come back to your own.