Marcus Aurelius says “Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel

harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been”.

One of the greatest lessons of stoicism is to take control of your perception. We’re

used to judging everything we come across. Any event we experience, any people we meet,

sights we see - all of them get a value judgement. Something was either bad, good, boring, fun,

beautiful, ugly, etc. This is, unbeknownst to us,

a very exhausting practice and also one that might affect our lives for the worse.

For example, judging every interaction you have on a particularly hard day as ‘awful’ gives the

day itself an even more negative view. If you label a party you went to as boring,

that is all it will be: that one boring part of your week. We often let our initial judgments of

things be influenced by our emotions, which means that they are most likely not entirely rational.

Furthermore, our tendency to judge every moment of our lives goes hand in hand with a tendency to

talk in metaphors and hyperboles that make things seem worse. If you get dumped by your partner,

you might say your ex ‘broke your heart’ instead of the fundamental fact that they

no longer feel for you the way they used to. This way of speaking - or rather:

this way of thinking - shapes how you feel. It is not the actual event that

makes you feel bad, but rather the way you unconsciously choose to think about it.

The stoics, in contrast, encourage people to be careful to judge everything you come across and

the things that you do and one of the ways to be careful is to 'undo your judgements' which

essentially means to look past them: to be able to forget your first instinct and to judge something

through a more optimistic and reasonable lens. You can try to ‘re-frame’ that boring party in

your mind as an event where you got to see a new place and meet some new people. OK,

afterwards you might note that you didn’t really resonate with anyone,

but you didn’t go in with the expectation of negativity.

As such, practising not to judge everything based on your first instinct and emotion is the very

best way to start training your perception on life. Whenever you think about anything

in an opinionated way, try to ask yourself, ‘Is this rational? What have I based my opinion on?

Is there a better or more positive way to interpret this?’ Marcus Aurelius stressed

that harms can only be if you consider them as harms. This means that any hard experience you

went through seems harder and worse, the harder and worse you consider it to be.

As such, you have complete control over how much certain situations affect you.

The stoics also encourage you to see every ‘bad’ thing that happens as an opportunity or

source for ‘good.’ As an exercise of training your perspective in a stoic way, there is a challenge

called ‘Turning The Obstacle Upside Down.’ When a new coworker is a slow learner and their mistakes

affect the company’s profits, you might feel frustration. This coworker is an obstacle to

what you are trying to achieve: effectiveness, efficiency and profit. However, this situation

can also be an opportunity for good. It is an opportunity for youth to exercise and practice

patience, to become a better teacher, to learn how to integrate new people into the company

and how to handle stressful times. All of these are skills that will also be useful later, and

should also help you increase profits in the long run, as well. On this subject, Marcus Aurelius

famously said: ‘The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.’

So, all in all, instead of judging everything you come across in an exaggerated sense,

take the time to look at things as they objectively are and you might find that life

is simpler and clearer than you thought. Every situation has a more positive interpretation

and a more negative one. When you adjust your mindset accordingly, you will find

that nothing bothers you as much as it used to, and you will get through life much more easily.