You’ll Be Called Worse…By Better
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Marcus Aurelius was the public face of an empire. Seneca published books and plays. Cato and Cicero ran for office. Epictetus was a slave to a powerful Roman at his whim and mercy. In other words, they knew what it was like to be criticized. They knew what it was like to be received warmly by the audience, and not so warmly. They were subject to withering abuse talked about as if they were not standing right there to be criticized.

or as if they didn't have normal human feelings. But of course they did. But what Stoicism was there to do was to help them endure the pains and blows of feedback and critique and attack. If only they really knew me, Epictetus once joked, they'd say even worse things. This was his way of making light of the cruel things that he would have often heard by his abusive owner.

We care about ourselves more than other people, Marcus Aurelius writes with bafflement in meditations, but care about other people's opinions more than our own. In another passage, he reminds himself to consider the character and the habits of the person attacking him, thinking about what they were doing in private just a few minutes ago.

These public-facing stoics would have loved the response of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau when he was told that Richard Nixon had called him an asshole. I have been called worse things by better people, he would later write.

Being criticized is part of the job. So is being misunderstood. Being abused isn't fair, but no one gets out of life without experiencing their share of it. We have to be ready for it and ready to put it in its proper context. We have to be ready to shrug it off and count ourselves as lucky that it wasn't worse, because it always can be.

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