Impressions, Judgments, & Perspectives
Wednesday Wisdoms for March 19, 2025
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
This month we’re exploring the theme of adversity.
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
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Impressions
🤨 Quote
“Right now, then, make it your habit to tell every jarring thought or impression: "You are just an appearance and in no way the real thing."”
Epictetus
Source: How to be Free, I.
Observation 🧐
Everything we encounter is some form of stimulus to us.
This is how our mind interacts with the world, it takes in everything around it, constantly. These are the impressions of life, the first things that hit our brain according to the Stoics.
“Impression arises first,” wrote Diogenes Laertius about the Stoics, “then thought, which is capable of discourse, articulates the subject's response to the impression.”
But it is rare for us to see anything just as it is. Rather, we often look upon things with the cover of opinion.
So it is our job first and foremost to remove this cover. Epictetus describes:
“Next, examine it and test it by these rules that you have. First and foremost: does it involve the things up to us, or the things not up to us?”
The impression is the first imprint we have of our experience. And if we’re not careful, we fall into the category of applying the wrong judgments to what sits before us.
It is very easy to wrap impressions with judgments. When this happens, whenever we receive the stimulus, we automatically, in a knee-jerk reactionary way, apply the judgment.
It’s because the impression is built by your full history and everything you’ve learned up to that point.
There is what sits before us, and then there’s the story we tell ourselves about what is before us.
🤔 Question
Have you ever had a formed judgment of something and every time you came upon it, you felt a specific way? How do you find a way to limit these judgments in lieu of an open mind?
Judgments
🤨 Quote
“Choose not to be harmed - and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed - and you haven't been.”
Marcus Aurelius
Source: Meditations 4.7
Observation 🧐
Everything around us is filled with judgments. Everything we do, we place a judgment upon.
But these do not have to be concrete.
In fact, we can and should adjust our judgments continuously. The Stoics believed that anything external to us was separated into three categories of good, bad, and indifferent. But to live a flourishing life, we have to know how to separate our externals into these categories.
But too often, we think externals will provide us flourishment. We think if we just get the car, or the money, or the job, our lives would be different.
And this may be. Good health is better than bad, money is better than poverty, having a car is better than no car. But none of these change our fundamental being.
It does not matter how much money, status, or property we own, it will not provide us flourishment, that can only come from within.
It is all dependent upon your character. It all boils back down to who we are as individuals. Nothing external can change that.
While some things are more desirable and can help elevate one’s life, it does not help with the path to true internal flourishment.
Only the individual can find and achieve that from within themselves.
🤔 Question
Pick something you repeatedly have to do. What judgments do you apply to it?
Beneath the paywall this week we explore the wisdom of Matthew Crawford. Click below to support and get access.