Future Events as Indifferents
This week you are going to study a concept the Stoics called "indifferents" (in Greek, "adiaphora," meaning things that are neither good nor bad in themselves) as they apply specifically to the future. A future event, whether illness, loss, failure, or death, is not good or evil on its own; only your judgment about it makes it so. That single insight is the key to understanding Stoic anxiety: you suffer not because bad things are coming, but because you treat uncertain future events as if they were already confirmed evils. This week you will learn to see future events clearly for what they are, and find out what that means for the fear and worry you carry every day.
Passage
But I wish to share with you to-day’s profit also. I find in the writings of our Hecato that the limiting of desires helps also to cure fears: “Cease to hope,” he says, “and you will cease to fear.” “But how,” you will reply, “can things so different go side by side?” In this way, my dear Lucilius: though they do seem at variance, yet they are really united. Just as the same chain fastens the prisoner and the soldier who guards him, so hope and fear, dissimilar as they are, keep step together; fear follows hope.
— Seneca, Letters 5.7
Reflection
Seneca opens a surprising door here: hope and fear are not opposites, they are the same chain. The Stoic concept at the heart of this week is 'indifferents' (Greek: adiaphora, meaning things that are in themselves neither good nor bad). Future events are indifferents because they have not happened yet and, even if they do, your judgment determines whether they harm you. The trap Seneca is pointing to is this: the moment you pin your wellbeing to a future outcome you want, you automatically create a matching dread of losing it. Hope and fear travel together because both treat the future as if it already decides your happiness.
Go deeper
Think of one thing you are currently hoping for: what fear travels alongside that hope, and what does that tell you about where you have placed your sense of security?
Practice
Name the Chain
Take two minutes and write down one thing you are hoping will happen in the next month. Directly beneath it, write the fear that mirrors it, the thing you are dreading if that hope fails. Just naming the pair is the practice. You are not trying to fix anything yet; you are learning to see the chain Seneca describes.