Day 12 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Something happens.
You experience it as bad.
The Stoics want you to pause there and ask: is it actually bad, or does it only seem bad because of the story you’re telling about it?
That question will feel offensive to some people.
It should.
It’s a genuinely hard question.
It deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed for being uncomfortable.
Here’s where it comes from.
Epictetus wrote: “Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.”
Marcus Aurelius put it this way: “If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgement about it — and it is in your power to wipe out this judgement now.”
Bad things stay bad.
What changes is where the suffering comes from: from the judgement layered on top of the event, not the event itself.
Change the judgement and the experience changes too, maybe not to pleasant, though to something more workable.
Someone at work makes a dismissive comment about veganism.
The event: a sentence was spoken.
The judgement you add: this person is attacking me, they don’t respect me, they think I’m ridiculous, this is a hostile environment, I’m never going to be understood.
The sentence was eight words.
The judgement is a story about your worth, your safety, and your place in the world, and the suffering comes from that story.
None of this means the comment was fine, that you should ignore it, or that your frustration is invalid.
The Stoic position is that your reaction is constructed, by you, from the raw material of the event.
Because you constructed it, you have more influence over it than you probably believe.
This idea is the ancestor of cognitive behavioural therapy, and that’s not a coincidence.
The founders of CBT were reading the Stoics.
The core CBT insight, that thoughts mediate between events and emotions, and that changing the thoughts changes the emotional response, is Epictetan, almost word for word.
For vegans, this distinction between events and judgements is both liberating and, in one specific way, worth interrogating carefully.
The liberating part: much of the distress in vegan life comes from the stories built around events, not the events themselves.
Someone eats meat at your dinner table.
The event is that a meal was eaten.
The suffering comes from what you add: the catalogue of injustice, the sense of personal affront, the feeling of being alone in what you believe, the weight of the broader system behind that single meal.
All of that is real, and all of it is a judgement you are, to some degree, constructing and maintaining.
The Stoic tool here is what Marcus called “objective description.”
Strip the event down to what actually happened, without adjectives, without implied meaning, without the story.
“A person ate a meal that contained animal products.”
Full stop.
Then, from that stripped description, choose deliberately what you want to add back.
What you add back can still carry moral weight.
The Stoic move is to choose how it matters, deliberately, rather than being pulled automatically into a reaction that may or may not serve you.
One part of this teaching is worth interrogating: there’s a version of it that tips into dismissiveness, the idea that suffering is always just a bad attitude, that pain is your own fault for judging wrongly.
The Stoics didn’t mean this.
Some things are genuinely bad.
Suffering that comes from real injustice, not a perceived slight, isn’t a story to be revised.
The animal welfare case isn’t a judgement added to a neutral event.
Animals really do suffer, and that suffering really does matter.
The distinction between events and judgements doesn’t dissolve moral reality.
What it does give you is a tool for managing your inner state in relation to that moral reality, so you can act from clarity rather than distress.
Responding to injustice from a centred, clear-eyed position produces different results than responding from a reactive, depleted one.
Stoicism is trying to help you get to the first.
The practice is simple and surprisingly revealing.
Take something that upset you recently.
Write it in two columns.
Left column: the bare facts, what actually happened, no adjectives, no interpretations, no implied meaning.
Right column: everything you added, the story, the significance, the emotion, the implications you drew.
Then look at both columns and ask: which parts of the right column are serving me?
Which parts are just noise I’m generating?
You might find that most of the weight sits in the right column.
Some of it you chose.
Some of it you could choose differently.
Practice for today
Pick something that upset you in the last week.
Write the bare facts, what actually happened, stripped of interpretation.
Then write the judgements you added.
Notice the gap between the two.
You don’t have to change the judgement today.
Just see it clearly.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.