Focusing on Your Own Character
This week's concept is "focusing on your own character," which the Stoics called prohairesis (say it: pro-HY-reh-sis), a Greek word meaning your capacity for reasoned choice, the part of you that decides what to value, how to respond, and who to become. It is the one thing that is always and only yours. When you direct your attention there instead of at what others have or how they are doing, envy loses its grip, because you are no longer measuring yourself against the wrong thing.
Passage
Other things are goods according to opinion, and though they are called by the same name as the true goods, the essence of goodness is not in them. Let us therefore call them “advantages,” and, to use our technical term, “preferred” things. Let us, however, recognize that they are our chattels, not parts of ourselves; and let us have them in our possession, but take heed to remember that they are outside ourselves. Even though they are in our possession, they are to be reckoned as things subordinate and poor, the possession of which gives no man a right to plume himself. For what is more foolish than being self-complacent about something which one has not accomplished by one’s own efforts?
— Seneca, Letters 74.17
Reflection
Seneca draws a line that the whole concept depends on. Some things are genuine goods, things that belong to your character and your choices; other things are merely 'preferred advantages,' external items like money, status, or reputation, things that can be useful but are not truly parts of you. The mistake that feeds envy is treating these external advantages as if they were goods of character, as if the person who has more of them is actually better than you. Focusing on your own character means keeping this distinction clear every day: what you have accumulated is not who you are, and what others have accumulated says nothing about your worth.
Go deeper
Which of the external things you most wish you had, if you are honest, do you treat as though possessing it would make you a better or more complete person, and where did that belief come from?
Practice
Separate the Columns
Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, list three things you currently want that are external (an income level, a title, recognition, a possession). On the right, write the character quality that you imagine each one would prove or provide. Then ask: could I cultivate that quality directly, without waiting for the external thing? Spend about seven minutes on this.