They’re Not Thinking About You At All

They’re awful. They’re frustrating. They need to be stopped. These are the people who take up so much space in our head.✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  They're not thinking about you at all. They're awful. They're frustrating. They need to be stopped. These are the people that take up so much space in our head. We stew about them. We fret about them. We plot against them. There's a memorable scene in Mad Men where a young copywriter, Michael Ginsberg, clearly bothered by Don Draper's reputation and presence, tries to get under his skin in an elevator. He says, "I feel bad for you." Don Draper doesn't take the bait. He just looks at him and says, "I don't think about you at all." Even though Don Draper is the iconic hero of that show, he is exactly the kind of broken and selfish person that ends up consuming far too much of our mental and emotional energy,

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  as Nero surely did for Seneca, or Caesar and Cicero did for Cato. We can't let these people take more from us than they already do. Can't let them take our joy and our focus and our time. We have to remember that in most cases, there's nothing personal in what they do. And to take it personally is to add to our suffering. We might as well stew about the weather or a flat tire. We should remind ourselves again and again, they don't deserve that kind of space in our heads. Let them be who they are. You be who you are. Save your energy for what matters.