Stoic Coffee Break

The Problem

When I was in middle school, there were two brothers, Jack and Tom, who would come over to play with me and my brother. One summer day, Tom was over at our house and then Jack showed up, and he was pissed. Tom had gotten a flat and replaced his tube with one of Jack’s. Jack wanted his tube back right then, rather than waiting until Tom came home. He tried to get the tube out of the tire, but didn’t have the right tools to do it. So he got part of the tube out of the tire, then pulled out his pocket knife and cut the tube. We all stood there watching this incredulously as he stomped away.

Later that day, we walked Tom and his now un-rideable bike back to his house. There we found a frustrated Jack trying to staple the sliced tube back together. We tired for a moment, shook our heads, and walked inside.

Think about what happened there. Jack wanted his tube. It was right in front of him. And to get it back, he destroyed it.

He didn’t get his tube, and Tom didn’t get home on his bike. Nobody won. Jack wasn’t even doing something selfish, because a selfish person would have ended up with a working tube.

So what do you call that?

In 1976, an Italian economic historian named Carlo Cipolla published a short essay with an answer. It’s called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. It’s written with tongue firmly in cheek, but it’s one of those jokes that gets less funny the longer you think about it.

His definition is simple. A stupid person causes losses to someone else while gaining nothing, and possibly losing something too. Notice that this has nothing to do with intelligence. Cipolla doesn’t care about your grades or your IQ. He looks at what you did and who it cost.

He sorts people’s actions into four types, and we can find all four in that one bike tube.

Jack could have helped Tom patch the flat and gotten his tube back. Both of them win. Cipolla calls that intelligent.

He could have let Tom keep it and gone without. Tom wins and Jack loses. That’s what Cipolla calls helpless.

He could have taken the tube and left Tom stranded. Jack wins and Tom loses. That’s the bandit.

Or he could pull out a pocket knife. Jack and Tom both lose. That’s what Cipolla calls stupid.

And here’s where Cipolla says something surprising. He says the stupid person is more dangerous than the bandit.

That might sound wrong until you think about the tube. If Jack had been a bandit, that tube would have still existed. Somebody could have still ridden on it. A bandit moves value from one person to another. Stupidity just destroys it.

The rest of his laws follow from there.

We always underestimate how many stupid people are out there.

Stupidity shows up at the same rate in every group, whatever their education or status.

And the rest of us keep forgetting how expensive it is to be anywhere near it.



Just ask Tom, who ended up walking that day because of somebody else’s temper.

Now, this is funny when it’s a bike tube and a stapler. It stops being funny when the person holding the knife is running your company or your country. Cipolla argued that declining societies don’t have a higher percentage of stupid people. What they have is more helpless people and more of what he called “bandits with overtones of stupidity.” So this also comes down to the rest of us, and how we respond.

But Cipolla only takes us so far. He tells us what Jack did. He doesn’t tell us why.

Nobody gets up in the morning and decides to destroy the thing they want. In that moment, standing in our yard with a pocket knife, cutting that tube made sense to Jack. So what did he believe that made it make sense?

The ancient Greeks had a word for this, and it doesn’t mean stupid.

The Philosophy

That word is amathia.

It's usually translated as "ignorance," but that misses what makes it interesting. Greek has another word for ordinary ignorance: agnoia. If you've never been taught how to patch a bike tube, that's agnoia. You don't know something, but somebody can show you.

Amathia is different. Socrates saw it in Alcibiades and Pericles, two of the most highly educated men in Athens. The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci translates it as "un-wisdom," the opposite of sophia. You can be smart, informed, and capable, and still be badly wrong about what actually matters.

It’s originally a Socratic idea, and the Stoics built on it. When Marcus Aurelius prepares himself each morning to deal with difficult people, he says they're this way because of their ignorance of what is good and what is evil. He doesn't mean they're dumb. He means their values are out of order.

So let's go back to Jack.

Jack knew how bike tubes work. He knew a cut tube doesn't hold air. If you'd stopped him and asked, he could have told you that. His problem wasn't information. In that moment, he believed that being wronged was intolerable, and that making it right, immediately, mattered more than the tube itself.

That's amathia. It's why he was still standing there later with a stapler.

Epictetus has a whole discourse on this. He asks why we get angry at thieves, and his answer is that we admire the things they take. Stop overvaluing your clothes, he says, and you won't be angry at the person who steals them. Jack wasn't really fighting over a tube. He was fighting for the idea that nobody gets to take what's his.

And this is where the Stoics redraw Cipolla's chart.

Cipolla's ledger counts external things: money, status, and bike tubes. Who ends up with more stuff? But the Stoics say none of that is your real good. Your real good is your character. And that changes the math.

Take the bandit. On Cipolla's chart, the bandit wins. If Jack had taken that tube and left Tom stranded, he'd have come out ahead.

But, would he? He'd have a tube, but he'd have become the kind of person who leaves his brother stranded over a tube. Marcus Aurelius clearly reminds us: "What injures the hive injures the bee." We're social creatures, so you can't damage the community without damaging yourself.

So for a Stoic, the bandit doesn't belong in his own quadrant. He's taken a loss he can't see. Every bandit is stupid. He just hasn't calculated the real costs.

The chart changes in other places too. The helpless person loses on Cipolla's chart, but someone who willingly pays a cost to do the right thing isn't helpless at all. We'll come back to that.

And the intelligent quadrant, where your good and everyone else's line up, starts to look a lot like what the Stoics mean by virtue.

Now, it’s very satisfying to hear all of this. You could walk away thinking, "Yeah, other people have amathia. I've known so many of them."

Epictetus has a question for that person. He pictures someone furious at the fools of the world, and he asks:

"How are you suddenly converted to wisdom?"

Because what does rage at a stupid person actually accomplish? It raises your blood pressure, ruins your day, and usually makes the situation worse. It costs you, it costs them, and nobody gains.

That's Cipolla's definition.

Every one of us has a pocket knife. The Stoics aren't saying there are wise people and stupid people. Stoic philosophy holds that almost none of us are sages. We all have moments when we're sure the tube has to come out right now.

So if we can't sort the world into the wise and the stupid, and we're on the list ourselves, what do we actually do when one of these people is standing in our driveway?

The Practice

The Stoics don’t promise you can avoid the damage. Sometimes you’re Tom, and you’re walking home. What they offer is two virtues that do different jobs here. Wisdom limits how much these people can cost you. Justice decides who you become in response.

Let’s start with wisdom, and I’ll use myself as the example.

Years ago, I was living in Amsterdam and looking for an apartment, which is one of the hardest things to find. I got referred to a guy who claimed to be an agent, and he showed me a great place in a part of town I wanted to be in, at a really good price. It almost seemed too good to be true. He gave me a contract and everything.

Then came the pressure. “I don’t know how long I can hold it.” So I paid to keep it on hold, and later I paid the deposit.

Then he stopped responding to my messages. And my first thought was that I was worried something had happened to him. But when I tried to call, the number had been disconnected.

He was fine. He’d defrauded me, and that fraud is on him. But I want to look at my part, because it’s the only part I could have done anything about.

My gut told me something was off. And the two things that made me suspicious, the price and the pressure, were the same two things that made me say yes. He didn’t have to talk me out of my doubts. I already wanted the apartment, so all he had to do was threaten to take it away.

Epictetus teaches that when an impression hits you, you don’t have to go along with it right away. You can stop and test it. My impression was, “This is a rare chance, and I’m about to lose it.” The question I skipped was, “Why does this have to happen before I can see if this is legit?”

So that’s the first practice: when you’re being rushed into something you badly want, slow down. Urgency is information.

The second is to expect these people. Marcus began his day by telling himself who he was going to meet. He wasn’t being cynical. If you’re not surprised, you’re much less likely to pull out your own knife.

The third is to judge by actions. Cipolla says stupidity has nothing to do with credentials, so don’t let a title or a contract stop you from thinking for yourself. Look at what someone has actually done, and who it cost. Then limit how much they can touch. Stop having the same argument. Don’t hand them more responsibility. Let go of the idea that you’re going to win this one.

But while wisdom on its own can help you protect yourself, and help you stay out of the blast radius, it leave everyone else in it. That’s where justice comes in.

Marcus gives us the simplest instruction I know for this:

“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then, or bear with them.”

First you teach them if you can. Epictetus says that if you show people their error, many will stop. When Jack was standing there with that knife, though, no one was going to teach him anything. Sometimes all you can do is bear with them.

But bearing with someone doesn’t mean leaving other people exposed. Nobody fixed Jack that day, and nobody could have. So, we walked Tom home.

So let’s go back to Amsterdam. Once I realized what had happened, I was disappointed in him and a little frustrated with myself. I resigned myself to the fact that I had made a bad choice and there was little I could do.

But there was one thing. I filed a police report. I wasn’t really doing it for the money. In fact, I had resigned myself to the idea that I would never see it. I wanted it on record, so that if he defrauded someone else, there would be a record of other incidents.

He was eventually caught. He had defrauded ten other people. And two years later, I got my money back.

I’m glad I got it back, but that’s not why the report was the right thing to do. It would have been right if I’d never seen that money again, and right if no one had ever caught him.

Remember Cipolla’s chart? Paying a cost so someone else might benefit puts you in the helpless quadrant. The Stoics call it justice.

So you have two failures to avoid. One is doing nothing while people get hurt. The other is getting even, which is how you end up holding the knife yourself.

And in between, there’s a harder path. You make sure you set the boundary. You tell the truth. Do your best to protect the people downstream. And do it without contempt, because the person in front of you is making the same kind of error you’ve made yourself. Epictetus says:

“If you must be affected by other people’s misfortunes, show them pity instead of contempt. Drop this readiness to hate and take offense.”

That doesn’t mean they get to keep doing it. It means you don’t have to carry the hatred.

Conclusion

I still think about Jack standing there with that stapler.

When I was a kid, I thought it was one the funniest thing I’d ever seen. And it is still pretty funny. But I look at it differently now.

Because there’s a moment in that story I never really considered back then. Jack had already cut the tube. He’d gotten what he wanted, which was to make the point. Then he went home, sat down with what he’d done, and tried to fix it with the only thing he could find.

I’ve done that myself. I’ve said the thing in the meeting that I had to spend the next few days walking back. I’ve sent the email I shouldn’t have. I’ve won the argument and lost what I was arguing for.

And I’d bet you’ve done it too. Most of us have a stapler somewhere.

Cipolla says we always underestimate the number of stupid people in circulation, and he’s probably right. But the Stoics would add that the count includes you, and that you’re the only one on the list you can actually do something about.

You can’t fix the Jacks of the world. You can’t control who shows up in your driveway, who gets promoted, or who gets elected. There will be people who cost you time and money and peace, and they’ll gain nothing from it. They may even leave you walking home.

Here’s what is up to you. You can see them clearly. You can limit the damage. You can look after the people standing next to you. And you can keep your own knife in your pocket.

So here’s something to try this week. Think about the situation that’s making you angriest right now. It might be a coworker, a family member, or someone on your screen.

Then ask yourself Cipolla’s question. What am I about to do, who gains from it, and who loses?

If the honest answer is that it costs them, it costs you, and nobody gains, you know what that’s called.

Put the knife away.

Then see if anyone needs a walk home.

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Ward Farnsworth is Professor of Law and holder of the W. Page Keeton Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the author of several books on philosophy including The Stoic Practice and The Socratic Method. His new book Should You Tip For Takeout? is a guide to seeing the applications of philosophy in everyday life.
Join us on this wide ranging conversation about philosophy and how you can become a better thinker! The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is
now open for enrollment!

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The Problem: Living in Repair Mode

Years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle. They had always been scary to me and I wanted to get over that fear, and save some gas on my commutes to work. While taking the course to get my permit, I clearly remember one of the most important lessons. In order to avoid a hazard in the road — a pothole, debris on the road, a stopped car — don’t look at it. When you focus on what you’re trying to avoid, you’re more likely to ride straight into it.

There’s a name for that. It’s called target fixation. Whatever holds your eyes, your hands follow. You steer toward what you’re staring at, even when it’s the very thing you’re trying to avoid. That’s why riders get told the same thing over and over: look where you want to go, not at what you’re afraid of hitting.

I’ve been thinking about how much of our inner life works the same way.

The other day when I was journaling I noticed that I kept listing all the ways that I was falling short of the things I wanted to accomplish. All the times that I didn’t stop doing some habit that I was trying to change. In each one, I was focused on what was broken. It made me reconsider my approach.

Let me give you two people. The first is an architect. Before anything gets built, the architect has a picture of what it’s supposed to be. There’s a plan and a purpose. Every decision gets measured against that plan.

The second is a repairman. The repairman’s whole job is finding what’s wrong. Something leaks, he patches it. Something cracks, he fills it. He’s always scanning for the next problem, because that’s the job.

Now, we need repairmen. Things break, and ignoring them just makes the problem worse. But think about what it would mean to live your whole life as one, with no plan and no picture of what you’re building. Just a constant scan for what’s wrong.

I think a lot of us do exactly that when it comes to who we are.

Try this. Think about the things you’re trying to improve about yourself right now. If you’re like most people, the list sounds something like: stop yelling, stop procrastinating, stop scrolling, stop overthinking, fix my temper.

Notice something about that list. Every item is a pothole. It’s a list of what’s broken.

And underneath that list there’s usually a quieter belief. It goes something like: once I fix all of this, then I’ll be a good person, as if goodness is what’s left over after you’ve patched every leak.

Here’s what happens when you live that way.

First, the flaw becomes the center of your attention. You wake up thinking about it and you go to bed reviewing it. You’re staring at the pothole, and you know where that leads.

Second, you become reactive. If there’s no plan, the only thing that tells you what needs attention is whatever feels uncomfortable right now. Today it’s your temper, tomorrow it’s your phone, next week it’s something else. You’re always responding and never building.

And third, the one that does the most damage: you start to believe the repairman’s basic assumption, which is that something is broken. Not that something went wrong, but that I am broken. Your identity becomes the defect list.

Picture two homeowners. Over the course of a year, they spend exactly the same amount of money on their houses. The first one only calls someone when something breaks. A leak here, a cracked tile there. All year long he’s fixing. The second one has a plan. He’s finishing the basement. When a pipe leaks along the way, he fixes it too, but the repair serves the plan.

At the end of the year, the first homeowner has the same house he started with. The second one has a better one.

So here’s where I want to land with this idea. Repair isn’t the problem. We all have things to fix, and pretending otherwise is just another way of avoiding things. The problem is repair without a blueprint. Because without a picture of what you’re building, you can’t even tell what’s actually broken. You only know what hurts.

And the Stoics had a lot to say about that.

The Philosophy: You Need a Blueprint

Start with a simple question. What does it mean for something to be broken?

A chair with a cracked leg is broken because it can’t do what a chair is for, which is holding you up. A clock that won’t keep time is broken because keeping time is its job. “Broken” always means broken relative to a purpose. Without knowing what something is for, you can’t say whether it’s broken. You can only say whether you like it.

The same goes for us. If you don’t know what you’re for, you have no way to tell a real flaw from something that’s just uncomfortable.

Marcus Aurelius wrestled with this on mornings when he didn’t want to get out of bed. In the first entry of Book Five of the Meditations, he reminds himself:

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present — I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?”

Notice what he does there. He doesn’t attack himself for being lazy. He doesn’t make a list of his flaws. He asks what he was made for, and he measures the moment against that. That’s an architect’s question.

Seneca gave his friend Lucilius a very practical version of this. In his Letters to Lucilius, he tells Lucilius:

“Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them.”

He then gives him a few examples to follow:

“Choose therefore a Cato; or, if Cato seems too severe a model, choose some Laelius, a gentler spirit.”

And then he gives the reason, which I love.

“For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.”

That’s the blueprint. And notice that the role model isn’t there to shame you. It’s there to show you what “straight”, what good character, actually looks like.

Epictetus says the same thing in the Enchiridion.

“Immediately prescribe some character and some form to yourself, which you shall observe both when you are alone and when you meet with men.”

Decide who you are going to be, and then build to that.

Now, I want to be honest here, because there’s a fair objection. The Stoics did a lot of repair work. Epictetus called his school a hospital. He said you shouldn’t walk out of a philosopher’s lecture feeling pleased with yourself, but feeling the sting of treatment. Seneca describes reviewing his entire day every night once the lamp was out:

“What bad habit of yours have you cured to-day? what vice have you checked? in what respect are you better?”

So weren’t the Stoics repairmen?

Look closer at Seneca’s review. He asks what bad habit he cured that day and what fault he resisted. But he also asks in what way he’s better. That’s not just hunting for defects. That’s checking progress against a plan. The inspection only makes sense because he knows what he’s trying to build.

That’s the difference. The Stoics repaired, but always against a blueprint.

And there’s something else in Stoicism that should take a lot of pressure off. The Stoics held that everyone who isn’t a perfect sage is, in an important sense, equally short of virtue. Cicero used the image of a person drowning a few inches below the surface can’t breathe any better than one drowning at the bottom of the sea.

That sounds rough, but let’s think about about what he really meant. If the gap between you and perfect virtue doesn’t close until you’re a sage, then “I’ll fix everything first, and then I’ll be good” is literally impossible. You’ll never finish the repairs.

So the Stoics stopped measuring the gap. They measured direction. They had a name for the person who is facing the right way and moving, the prokoptōn, someone making progress. Not finished. Not perfect. Someone under construction.

So how does building actually work?

Epictetus describes it clearly:

“If you like doing something, do it regularly; if you don't like doing something, make a habit of doing something different. The same goes for moral inclinations. When you get angry, you should know that you aren't guilty of an isolated lapse, you've encouraged a trend and thrown fuel on the fire.”

Then he applies it to anger.

“If you don't want to be cantankerous, don't feed your temper, or multiply incidents of anger. Suppress the first impulse to be angry, then begin to count the days on which you don't get mad.”

That’s not a repairman fighting a flaw head-on. That’s a builder killing one habit while building another.

Let me make that real.

Picture a dad who keeps snapping at his kids. In repair mode, his project is “stop snapping at my kids.” Every night he replays the moments he lost it. He feels terrible. He resolves to do better. And snapping at his kids stays the center of his attention. It’s the pothole he can’t stop staring at.

Now give him a blueprint. Instead of “stop snapping,” he asks: “What kind of father do I want to be?” Maybe the answer is: I want to be the dad my kids aren’t afraid to bring bad news to.

Now he has something to build. When they come to him, he gets down at eye level. He asks a question before he reacts. He lets a pause happen. He’s building a new way of being.

And here’s the thing. He didn’t defeat the snapping. He crowded it out. There’s less room for it, because he’s filling that space with something else. Rater than being a broken father being repaired, he’s a father under construction.

The Practice: From Stop List to Blueprint

So what do you actually do with this? Here’s a practice in four steps. You can do the first three in about fifteen minutes, and the fourth takes a few minutes every night.

Step one: write your stop list.

Get a piece of paper and write down the things you’re trying to fix about yourself.

A few that I had on my list:

Stop scrolling on social media when you get up in the morning.

Stop pushing things off just because you’re tired.

Don’t have a whiskey with dinner on weekdays.

Then look at the list. Count how many items start with “stop,” “less,” “don’t,” or “fix.” If it’s most of them, you’re not alone.

Psychologists call these avoidance goals: goals aimed at getting away from something rather than moving toward something. In a 1997 study, Andrew Elliot, Kennon Sheldon, and Marsha Church followed students across a semester. The students who had more avoidance goals reported lower well-being, and their well-being actually declined over the semester. Your stop list is just a list of potholes. Staring at it wears you down.

Step two: turn each item into a blueprint.

For every item on the list, ask yourself: If this flaw weren’t here, what would be standing in its place? Who would I be?

“Stop procrastinating” becomes “someone who starts before he feels ready.”

“Less time on my phone” becomes “someone who is actually present with the people in front of him.”

“Stop snapping at my kids” becomes “the dad my kids aren’t afraid to bring bad news to.”

Here’s a quick test. Could you say the new version about the person you’d choose as your Cato? If you can, it’s a blueprint. If it still sounds like a correction, keep working on it.

This is Seneca’s ruler. You’re not writing a list of what’s crooked anymore. You’re drawing what straight looks like.

Step three: attach one small action to each blueprint.

Remember Epictetus: every habit is strengthened by the corresponding acts. So for each line on your blueprint, pick one small, concrete action you can do today:

Starts before you feels ready mean working on the first ten minutes of the hardest task, before getting stuck clearing email.

Being present with the people in front of you means putting phone in another room during dinner.

The dad his kids can talk to starts with one question before reacting.

Keep each action small enough that you can do it on a bad day. Construction doesn’t happen in heroic bursts. It happens one brick at a time.

Step four: change your evening review.

Keep Seneca’s practice, but notice where you point it. Instead of starting with “What did I do wrong today?”, ask two questions:

Where did I build today?

Where did I drift from the plan?

Notice the word drift. Not “fail” and not “break.” When a cyclist drifts off his line, he doesn’t decide he’s a terrible rider. He looks up and steers back. Drift is a navigation problem, not a verdict on your character.

And then do what Epictetus suggested: count the days. Not the days you failed, but the days you built. Once a week, look back at the count. That’s how you see your trajectory, which is the only thing a prokoptōn is measuring.

One warning. Don’t let the blueprint become a new stick to beat yourself with. If you catch yourself holding it up and thinking “look how far I am from that,” you’re measuring the gap again. You’ve turned the architect back into a repairman. The blueprint points a direction, not distance.

Which brings us to what to do when you drift, and you will.

Conclusion: Maintenance not Repair

Let's go back to the house one more time.

The architect's house still needs work. Gutters get cleaned. Paint gets touched up. The furnace gets serviced every fall. From the outside, it looks a lot like what the repairman does.

But it isn't the same. Repair is triggered by failure. Something breaks, it hurts, and you scramble to fix it. Maintenance is done before anything breaks, and for a completely different reason. You maintain something because it's worth keeping.

I make sure to make time for maintenance on my bike. Cleaning the chain, checking the tires before a long ride. I don't do it because the bike is broken. I do it because you care about my bike and where it's going to take me.

That's the shift I want to leave you with. The same work can come from two completely different places. You can work on yourself because you believe you're broken, or because you believe you're building something worth taking care of.

Maintenance assumes you've already built something of value. And you have. Every time you acted on your blueprint, every brick you laid, that's real. It's yours. Taking care of it isn't an admission that you're broken. It's what you do with something you value.

And you will drift. Some days you'll snap at your kids. Some days the phone will win. Marcus Aurelius knew this. He was emperor of Rome, writing to himself, and he still needed this reminder:

"Be not disgusted, nor discouraged, nor dissatisfied, if thou dost not succeed in doing everything according to right principles; but when thou hast failed, return back again, and be content if the greater part of what thou doest is consistent with man's nature, and love this to which thou returnest."

Return back again. Not "start over," and not "tear it all down." Return to the plan. And notice the last part: love this to which thou returnest. He's not telling himself to grit his teeth and go back to the work. He's telling himself to love the blueprint. To love what he's building.

That's the difference between a repairman and an architect. One works out of fear of what's broken. The other works out of love for what's being built.

So here's what I'd ask you to take with you this week. You don't become good by fixing everything that's wrong with you. You'll never finish that list. You become good by building what's right, and the fixing takes care of itself along the way.

Pick your Cato. Draw your blueprint. Lay one brick today.

And when you're out there, on the bike or anywhere else, and you notice your eyes locking onto the pothole, remember what every rider learns:

Look where you want to go.

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

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Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.

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Find the transcript here.

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

Watch episodes on YouTube!

Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.

Thanks again for listening!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Problem

The last few months have been isolating for me. I was working hard on my book, which I turned in last week. It was exhausting, but I'm proud of what I've written. It also meant giving up a lot of social time. After writing for six or seven hours, I was often so drained that I skipped things I'd planned to do, because I just didn't have the energy.

But as I thought about how much I'd been staying home, I realized this wasn't new. Looking back over the last few years, I could see how easy it's become to stay home and avoid the friction of the outside world. The music I listen to, the movies I watch, the things I have delivered: they're all conveniences I appreciate, but they take me out of the experience of everyday life out in the world.

When I was growing up, I had to save my money to buy a record or a CD, so I was picky about what I bought. I'd talk to the people working in the store, friends, sibling, and ask them what they liked. Once I made my choice, I'd go home and listen to it all the way through, reading the liner notes and lyrics. "Oh wow, Stevie Wonder played harmonica on Sting's Brand New Day?" "I knew it! That's Bruce Hornsby playing piano on The End of the Innocence."

Sometimes an album took effort. Not every song grabbed me right away. Some took a few listens before I liked them, and some just weren't as good as the others. But listening all the way through, I got a sense of the full story the artist was trying to tell, why they put this song after that one. The album itself was a story.

We'd also swap albums with friends and siblings, partly to save money and partly to discover something new. We'd talk about the songs we liked and what we thought they meant. It was inconvenient compared to sending a link or sharing a playlist today. But that friction (the cost, the trip to the store, having to sit at home and play it) added something. Because we spent money we'd earned, the album we chose mattered more than all the ones we didn't buy. And sharing it took effort, so it became something we bonded over.

TV was the same. We had one TV, and shows aired when they aired. My siblings and I would argue about what to watch, then all sit on the couch together. Whether it was Battlestar Galactica, The A-Team, or a James Bond film, we laughed, cried, and talked about it afterward. That inconvenience brought us together.

This isn't me telling stories about the good old days. It's recognizing that convenience has a cost. Why sit on the couch together at the same time each week when everyone can go to their own room and watch whatever they want? Why invest in an album when the algorithm will queue up the next song and let you skip anything that takes effort to like?

I was reading an article in The Atlantic about how the convenience of modern life has made us lonelier, and there was a line in it I think the Stoics would agree with: "Inconvenience is the cost of community."

Kurt Vonnegut understood this. He didn't keep a box of envelopes at home. When he needed one, he'd walk to the store to buy it, and along the way he'd talk to his neighbors, see the scenery, and have, as he put it, one hell of a good time. That friction was the price of being part of his community.

Today we order food instead of going out to pick it up. We stream movies instead of watching them with strangers in a theater. We text instead of calling, even though research shows a phone call leaves us feeling far more connected. We've reduced friction so much that we can go days without interacting with another person beyond the bare minimum.

Even when we do go out, the store has become a place to get in, get what you need, and get out. We used to go to the mall not to buy anything, but just to hang out and run into people. Those random encounters, the conversations with strangers, the person you'll never meet who might have become your next best friend: that's what we're giving up.

I once did a thought experiment: what's the end result of perfect productivity and efficiency in our society? I came to the conclusion that it's each of us living in a little box where everything is delivered and streamed. Why face the friction and inconvenience of the world when you can be catered to and endlessly entertained? In a way, it's not much different from The Matrix.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we're there yet, but we're heading down a similar path. How often have you ordered something online that you could have bought at a store in your neighborhood? How often have you had food or groceries delivered instead of going out? How often has your family been in separate rooms, each watching their own shows, instead of sharing a movie or just having a conversation?

We prefer to stay in our little boxes and avoid that friction. The Stoics would have looked at that little box and said it's not just lonely. It's unnatural.

The Philosophy

Marcus Aurelius opens Book Two of the Meditations by reminding himself that we were born to work together, like hands and feet, like the upper and lower rows of teeth. And then he says something that I think hits hard today: to turn your back on someone is unnatural.

We don't think of convenience as turning our back on anyone. But every time we choose the app over the person, that's a small turn away.

Later, in Book Eight, Marcus has an image I find haunting. He asks if you've ever seen a severed hand or foot, cut off and lying apart from the body. That, he says, is what we do to ourselves when we cut ourselves off from others. But then he adds the hopeful part: unlike a severed hand, we can rejoin. We can reattach ourselves to the whole.

Now, to be fair, the Stoics also valued solitude. Seneca, in his seventh letter, tells his friend Lucilius to avoid crowds. So am I contradicting the Stoics here?

I don't think so, because in that same letter Seneca says to spend time with people who will make you better, and with people you can help become better. He isn't telling us to withdraw from people. He's telling us to be intentional about them. Solitude chosen for reflection is a practice. Isolation chosen because it's easier is avoidance.

And Seneca goes further. In his ninth letter, he says the wise person is self-sufficient, yet still wants friends. Not so there's someone to sit by his bed when he's sick, but so that he has someone whose sickbed he can sit beside.

Think about that. The point of friendship, for Seneca, is to be inconvenienced for someone. That's the cost of community, and the Stoics saw it as a privilege, not a burden.

The Stoic Hierocles pictured each of us at the center of a set of circles. First ourselves, then family, then friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, and finally all of humanity. He said our job is to draw those circles inward, to treat the people further out a little more like the people closest to us.

Convenience does the opposite. It pushes the circles outward. The person who makes our coffee, our neighbor, the guy at the record store — each become transactions instead of people. And eventually the only circle left is the one we're sitting in, alone, in our little box.

The Practice

So what do we do about it? I'm not going to tell you to cancel your streaming services and throw your phone in a river. The Stoics would call convenience an indifferent: neither good nor bad in itself. What matters is how we use it. The question isn't whether we use convenience; it's whether convenience is using us.

Seneca had a practice for exactly this. In his eighteenth letter, he tells Lucilius to set aside a few days now and then to live on the plainest food and roughest clothing, and then ask himself, "Is this what I was afraid of?" The point wasn't to suffer. It was to remind himself that he didn't need the comfort, so the comfort didn't own him.

I think we can do the same thing with convenience. Not by giving it all up, but by choosing friction on purpose. Here are a few ways to start.

1. Buy the envelope.

Pick one convenience a week and deliberately skip it. Walk to the store instead of ordering online. Pick up the takeout instead of having it delivered. Go to the coffee shop instead of brewing at home. And when you're there, talk to someone. The cashier, the barista, the person in line. That's Vonnegut's envelope. The errand isn't the point; the people you meet along the way are.

2. Ask a person first.

When I was growing up, if I wanted to learn about something, I'd go to the library. I'd ask my parents, my siblings, my friends what they knew. If I needed help with something I didn't have the skills for, I'd ask someone who did. If I was struggling with a personal problem, I'd talk to my siblings or friends.

Now we just get online. We ask AI. And every time we do, we skip a chance to connect with someone. So before you look it up, ask a person. Not because they'll always know more, but because asking for help is how relationships get built. It lets someone be useful to you, and that's a gift to them, too.

3. Call instead of text.

Text is convenient, but a voice carries far more than words. Next time you're about to send a message to a friend, call them instead. Better yet, ask to meet up.

4. Share something the slow way.

Pick an album and listen to it start to finish, then share it with someone and talk about it. Or get the family together and watch a movie at the same time, in the same room, with no phones. Let it be a little inconvenient. Argue about what to watch. That's part of it.

And here's the other side of it. Remember Seneca's friend at the sickbed. Community isn't just about letting yourself be inconvenienced. It's about being willing to be an inconvenience, too. To ask for the ride, the help, the favor. Most of us hate asking, because we don't want to be a burden. But when we refuse to ever be an inconvenience to anyone, we're also refusing to let anyone be close to us.

Conclusion

When Kurt Vonnegut walked to the store for a single envelope, he could have saved himself the trip by buying a whole box. It would have been more efficient. But he understood something we've forgotten: life doesn't happen in the efficient path. It happens in the detours. The neighbor you stop to chat with, the stranger in line, the friend you call instead of text.

The Stoics believed we were made for each other, like hands and feet, like the two rows of teeth. Every convenience that lets us skip another person is a small turn away from our nature. And every bit of friction we choose to accept is a chance to turn back.

So this week, go buy the envelope. Pick one convenience and skip it. Call someone. Ask for help. Let yourself be inconvenienced, and let yourself be an inconvenience to someone else.

Because inconvenience is the cost of community. And community is worth the price.

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