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Why Most Things Do Not Matter: Indifferents (Episode 154)
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What if the things you obsess over daily don't ultimately matter? The ancient Stoics had a radical idea: most of what we chase - wealth, fame, even health - is neither good nor bad. They called these things "indifferents."
In this episode, Caleb reads his short piece on indifferents and adds additional commentary.
Read the piece: https://www.stoaletter.com/p/indifferents
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Transcript
Introduction & Episode Format
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. Today is going to be more of a soliloquy. I'm going to be reading from my letter. This is my Stowe letter on the concept of indifference and adding some initial commentary. We've we've had some positive ah feedback about these episodes. We're going to do a handful more of them.
00:00:25
Speaker
This is still part of an experiment, so perhaps if you don't like these as much, let us know. If you want to increase the frequency of these kinds of episodes, we'd be happy to do it. So yeah, just send us an email, stoa at stoameditation dot.com. That's the best way to reach both Michael and I. So here's the essay. I'll add some thoughts of my own as I read it.
00:00:51
Speaker
A central
Understanding Stoic Indifference
00:00:52
Speaker
Stoic concept is indifference. To understand it, it's essential to understand Stoic views on the good. The good is what provides the guiding North Star to our lives. When we see it, we're motivated to follow it. The Stoics were not just looking for something sometimes good, they were seeking the unconditionally good. For this reason, they settle on virtue. No matter the situation, acting with virtue is good.
00:01:26
Speaker
Now, indifference are things that are conditionally good. Sometimes they are worth pursuing, but often they are not.
00:01:35
Speaker
Just to pause here, there's a line, when we see it, we're motivated to follow the good. When we see the good, we're motivated to pursue it. That's not merely a poetic device. What the Stoics thought was, because of their focus on knowledge, their view of Stoic psychology, is that if you can see the good, when you believe that something is good, then you will be motivated to pursue it.
00:02:02
Speaker
So that's I think that's a that's a little bit of an aside, but it's an important detail to understand about stoicism is that they had this cognitive view of motivation. you know If you believe that something is good, then you're going to be driven to pursue it.
00:02:20
Speaker
And we know, and why does that matter? It matters because you can change your beliefs and because you can change your beliefs, you can change what you're motivated to do. And because you can change your motivation, you know, you essentially you can change who you are. You can change what you do. Right. Returning to the
Diogenes Laertius on Stoic Indifference
00:02:39
Speaker
essay.
00:02:41
Speaker
Talking about indifference, and we have a quote here from Diogenes Laertius. So the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius describes the Stoic view. The Stoics say that some existing things are good, others are bad, and others are neither of these.
00:02:59
Speaker
Everything which neither does benefit nor harms is neither of these. For instance, life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, noble birth, and their opposites, death, disease, pain, ugliness, etc.
00:03:17
Speaker
ah so That's a great list of things the Stoics believed were not good or bad, which is to say, if you see something that promotes life, that doesn't necessarily mean one should pursue it. If you see something that causes death, that doesn't mean that you should necessarily avoid it. As the line goes, some fates are worse than death. As
Preferred vs. Dispreferred Indifference
00:03:42
Speaker
I continues, what matters is how we use these things.
00:03:46
Speaker
For example, in general, health is worth promoting, but we wouldn't want to choose health over everything. A long life isn't necessarily a good one. The stoics divided indifference between preferred and dispreferred indifference. Preferred indifference are suitable to our nature, so they're often worth pursuing. Dispreferred indifference like pain or not. So we typically avoid them.
00:04:16
Speaker
but they're not bad in and of themselves. Often we should choose them. As the Stoics are fond of saying, it's not things in themselves that harm us, but our opinion of them. We could also say it's not things in themselves that benefit us, but how we use them.
00:04:37
Speaker
What's ultimately bad for the Stoics is vice and what's ultimately good is virtue. Think about a game or competition. What's good is being an excellent player and doing your best to win. That's the ultimate goal. Every game will have techniques that are typically good things to do, but most games, especially complicated and sophisticated ones, do not have strategies that work 100% of the time.
00:05:05
Speaker
you know These strategies are preferred, but not always good. The technique and strategy you use, the technique and strategy you choose depends on the circumstances, your opponent and who you are. How you deploy your chosen techniques and strategies will determine how good of a player you are.
00:05:28
Speaker
Another
Virtue and Wise Choices
00:05:29
Speaker
aside here, a frame that can be useful for thinking about preferred and dispreferred indifference is that, so Stoics, they have a very simple view of the good. What's good? Virtue. What's vice? Bad. But there's another level of value.
00:05:48
Speaker
where some things are naturally preferable and others are naturally worth avoiding. Of course, that list of ah positive aspects of life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, noble birth, those are preferred indifference, whereas death, disease, pain are dispreferred indifference. One way to think about this idea of preferred versus dispreferred is this is how we make decisions or we know what makes
00:06:24
Speaker
a given character trait, a virtue, what makes it virtuous is the ability but to choose between indifference well. And a good choice means essentially weighing up these different factors of referred, dispreferred, and making coming to excellent judgments ah for each situation.
00:06:50
Speaker
So that might be a frame that they that you find useful is that well, preferred, dispreferred, indifference. Yes, they're not ultimately good, ultimately bad, but they are the means by which one becomes virtuous because for the Stoics, you know virtue essentially is the ability to Choose between indifference or if you want to take the frame that we get from Epictetus on this One way to see it is that it's the ability to manage Impressions. What does that mean? It means responding to Impressions in the right way, you know, essentially developing knowledge and seeing things for what they are ah Which is to say seeing them as naturally preferred or naturally just preferred and choosing between them
00:07:41
Speaker
Alright, back to the essay. In life, virtue provides that ultimate goal. How you use indifference is what makes you virtuous. The indifference are the material for virtue. There's essential confusion here that one sometimes sees. Perhaps this isn't true for you, listener, but many sometimes say the fact that something is indifferent means you shouldn't care about it. But that is not so.
00:08:10
Speaker
Just because things like reputation or other people's behavior are different doesn't mean they are irrelevant. What we're each called to do is respond to things well. Often, caring and responding to other people with conviction is the right path forward. And that concludes this essay on indifference. It's a guiding stoic idea and I think it's one that I think it's one that takes the weight off of many decisions in life. You know, we hear this list of indifference from dialogues, layerages, life, health, pleasure, death, disease, pain,
00:08:57
Speaker
For the statistics, this is not what ultimately matters. At the same time, it doesn't take the vitality, the energy, the things we care about life. It doesn't take that out of the equation either because you these are just the things we must choose between living well it looks like managing these factors.
00:09:20
Speaker
well, caring about them, devoting ourselves for the right thing, and improving ourselves along the way. Thanks for listening.