The Blog

The Weight We Give to Strangers

Most men, if they are honest, have changed what they said, what they wore, or what they chose to do because of what they imagined someone else might think. Not someone important. Often someone they barely know. Sometimes someone they have never met and never will.

This is not a modern problem. It is a human one. But the modern world has given it new dimensions and new scale. An opinion, in the past, required proximity. Someone had to actually see you, know you, be present in your life before their view of you could reach you. Now the machinery for receiving other people’s opinions is in your pocket and switched on at all times.

The Stoics had a great deal to say about this. None of it was particularly gentle.

Epictetus on What Belongs to You

Epictetus, who had been a slave before becoming one of the most influential philosophers of the ancient world, was not a man who had the luxury of philosophical abstraction. He understood, from direct experience, what it meant to have no control over your circumstances. What he retained, always, was control over his own responses and his own judgements. This distinction, between what is in your power and what is not, is the foundation of his entire philosophy.

The opinions of other people, he argued, are not in your power. They arise in other minds, from other experiences, filtered through other assumptions and prejudices that you cannot see and cannot change. A man who makes the quality of his day dependent on what other people think of him has anchored his wellbeing to something he cannot control. This is not modesty or social awareness. It is, in Epictetus’s view, a form of self abandonment.

He was particularly sharp about the performance of virtue, the tendency to act well in public in order to be seen acting well, while doing something different in private. The man who is generous when there is an audience and indifferent when there is not has not developed generosity. He has developed a talent for impression management. These are not the same thing, and the Stoics refused to pretend otherwise.

The Machinery of Opinion

What has changed since Epictetus is not the basic dynamic but its scale and speed.

The opinion that used to reach you through conversation, through the raised eyebrow of a colleague or the comment of a neighbour, now reaches you through a counting system. Likes. Views. Comments. Follower counts. The quantification of other people’s reactions has turned approval into a metric that can be tracked, compared, and optimised. A man who would not have thought to ask a stranger whether they approved of his lunch now publishes a photograph of it and waits to find out.

This is not an argument that social media is uniquely evil or that everyone who uses it is lost. Most people navigate it with more self awareness than the critics allow. But the structure of the system rewards the performance of a self rather than the development of one. It offers validation as a substitute for the harder work of deciding what you actually value and living accordingly.

Epictetus would have identified the problem immediately. Not the technology. The willingness to let the response of strangers function as a guide to how you should behave.

What the Need for Approval Is Actually About

The desire for approval is not weakness. It is, at its root, a social instinct that served a clear purpose in the kind of small, interdependent communities that human beings evolved in. Being accepted by the group had genuine survival value. Being excluded from it was serious. The instinct to monitor how others perceive you is not irrational. It is ancient.

The Stoics did not argue that the instinct was wrong. They argued that it needed to be governed rather than obeyed. Marcus Aurelius, who spent much of his life in public view and subject to the judgement of senators, soldiers, and an entire empire, wrote at length in Meditations about the danger of letting that attention shape his sense of himself. He could not avoid being observed. He could avoid letting observation define him.

The distinction he drew was between the judgement of men who have thought carefully about what is good and the judgement of men who have not. The first kind of judgement, from someone whose opinion is grounded in genuine understanding and genuine knowledge of you, deserves consideration. The second kind, from anyone who has formed a view without the materials to form a reliable one, deserves very little.

Most of the opinions that arrive uninvited, whether from strangers online, from acquaintances who know you partially, or from the imaginary critics we carry around in our own heads, fall into the second category.

The Imaginary Audience

There is a particular phenomenon that psychologists have documented and the Stoics understood intuitively: the imaginary audience. The sense that other people are watching you, judging you, and thinking about you far more than they actually are.

The reality is that most people are too occupied with their own lives and their own anxieties to give much sustained thought to yours. The colleague you are worried about has his own worries. The stranger who might have noticed your mistake has already forgotten it. The audience that feels so present and so attentive is, to a very large extent, a construction of your own making.

Marcus Aurelius wrote about this directly. He described the men who had spent their lives seeking fame, whose reputations had filled rooms and commanded attention, and noted how completely they had been forgotten within a generation or two. The opinion of the crowd, even when genuine and sustained, has a very short half life. The idea that it can provide anything durable is, in his view, an illusion.

This is not cynicism. It is arithmetic.

The Practical Question

The Stoic position is not that other people’s opinions are worthless. It is that you need to make a clear assessment of whose opinion actually deserves weight before you give any of them influence over your choices.

The question to ask is not “what will people think.” It is “what will this particular person, who knows me well and whose judgement I respect, think.” That is a very different question, and it applies to a much smaller group of people than the vague, ambient sense of being watched and judged.

For most decisions, the group is very small. In some cases it contains no one other than yourself.

Epictetus was direct about this. The only opinion that should function as a reliable guide to your own behaviour is the opinion of your own best judgement, the considered view of the person you are when you are thinking clearly and honestly rather than managing appearances. Every other opinion is input. It can inform. It should not govern.

Living Without the Audience

There is a test that Marcus Aurelius recommended implicitly throughout Meditations, which is to ask whether you would be comfortable doing what you are doing if no one were watching. Not because you should be indifferent to the social world, but because the answer tells you something important about your actual motivations.

A man who would behave the same way with an audience as without one has, in the Stoic sense, achieved something real. His actions are not performances. They are expressions of who he actually is. That kind of consistency is not easy to build. It is built slowly, through small decisions made when no one is paying attention.

The opinion you didn’t ask for is easy to dismiss in theory and harder to dismiss in practice, partly because the system is designed to deliver it constantly and partly because the desire for approval is genuinely human and not simply a weakness to be overcome.

But the Stoics were clear about the destination, even when the path is difficult. A life shaped by your own judgement is yours. A life shaped by the judgement of others is theirs, even if you are the one living it.

That is a distinction worth taking seriously.