Training Through Hardship
This week you'll work through one of Stoicism's most demanding ideas: that hardship is not an obstacle to a good life but the very medium through which one is built. The passages move you from understanding why training matters, through the uncomfortable realization that your softness is chosen, and finally to a stripped-down, almost defiant clarity about what hardship actually is. By Saturday you won't just have thought about this; you'll have practiced it in your body and your daily choices.
Passage
When you have become adjusted to simple living in regard to your bodily wants, do not preen yourself about the accomplishment; and so likewise, if you are a water-drinker, do not on every occasion say that you are a water-drinker. And if ever you want to train to develop physical endurance, do it by yourself and not for outsiders to behold; do not throw your arms around statues, but on occasion, when you are very thirsty, take cold water into your mouth, and then spit it out, without telling anybody.
— Epictetus, Handbook 47
Reflection
Epictetus pulls hard in the opposite direction from where you might expect after five days of building conviction. Don't boast about your training, he says. Don't perform it. If you want to build physical endurance, go do it alone. If you are thirsty, take cold water in your mouth and spit it out, and tell no one. The training this week is real only if it stays private. Once you make it a social display, the thing you are actually practicing is vanity, not endurance. This is a check on everything you have done so far: the work is for you, not for an audience.
Go deeper
In what ways have you been doing your Stoic practice, or your self-discipline more broadly, partly for the benefit of how it looks to others, and what would the practice look like if that external witness were removed entirely?
Practice
Training in Secret
Choose one act of voluntary hardship from earlier in the week, or a new one, and do it today with a single constraint: you may not mention it to anyone, not before, not after, not even indirectly. If the urge to mention it arises, note that urge without acting on it. At the end of the day, reflect privately on whether the practice felt different without the possibility of being seen.