10 Stumbling Blocks For Stoics
how to recognize and deal with common problems that draw you off course
(This piece was previously published in Practical Rationality)
I was invited to give a talk at the online Stoicon-X Norway in 2021, which led to some excellent conversation afterwards. I recorded the presentation itself in the video below, and then cleaned up the transcript of that video into this piece, which I hope might prove useful for those traveling along the Stoic path. I would like to thank Harald Kavli and Logan Vallandingham for their hospitality! The full talk transcript is below.
Thanks! That’s that’s a very kind welcome from a friend and a colleague. I’m really happy to be here at this inaugural (we can call it that!) Stoicon-X Norway. Hopefully we’ll be doing this for years to come. It’s great to see the the interest and growth in Stoicism!
When when Harold proposed this to me, originally I thought: well let’s talk about things that people run into that are real challenges and problems that come up in the Stoic meeting groups. Whether they be face-to-face or online, or in Facebook (you notice the largest one that has tens of thousands of people belonging to it), you notice that a lot of the same problems and challenges keep coming up over and over again. And there’s there’s good reasons for that.
Then I came on to this sort of title idea of “Stoic stumbling blocks,” and what I mean by them are skandala — things that you literally trip over, or that stand in the way (we’ll talk about that in just a bit). And then after I’d given this a lot of thought and we’d talked about it, Harold said: well you know the people here are probably not going to be beginners, but much more advanced students of Stoicism, people who have a solid background in practice and knowledge.
And I thought: well okay, I can still do the same presentation more or less because Stoicism — just like any other virtue ethics or intentional way of living — is not like a role playing game or a video game, where you level up, and once you make it from level one to level two, you’ve left level one behind all-together. I think we still run into a lot of the same issues over and over again. Sometimes we have more tools, and we’ve got better perspective on it, but it’s not as if I think any of us — unless we’re really fortunate — are going to be completely free of these stumbling blocks in our life.
Stumbling Blocks, Scandals, and Hindrances
I want to say a little bit about stumbling blocks to begin with. So I mentioned skandalon, the word we get “scandal” from. In Greek this is something that you run into, and you trip over. Or you know, it discourages you and dismays you, it steers you aside from where you’re going. So I think that’s one kind of stumbling block. And then another term that gets used a lot especially in Epictetus is empodia, the things that it’s written as “hindrances,” or the things you could actually put on your legs to hobble you. There are things that stand in our way, and keep us from being able to pursue the path that we want to be on. They restrict us. They interfere with us. And we run into these pretty frequently.
There’s ways of dealing with them, and ways of not being (you could say) disabled by them, and and so I’m going to go into that. Some of these could apply, I think, as well to other modes of intentional living, or personal development, or philosophy as a way of life. So i think these would arise for people doing living philosophy from an Epicurean perspective, or Cynic perspective, or whatever else we’re going to go into, because they’re widespread issues that are rooted in our human nature, and our damaged human nature, our screwed up human nature that we’re trying to disentangle and straighten out using Stoicism.
But then there’s some that I think are specific to Stoicism because of the way we’ve understood things. So we could talk about a lot of other ones, and I think maybe in the Q&A and discussion, we might. This is not a comprehensive list that I’m providing you with, and I think we can also draw a lot from our own experiences and those of others.
We’re doing that when we read Seneca or read Epictetus, and we see them writing to somebody — or in Epictetus’s case, criticizing and haranguing them, and sometimes poking fun at them. When we read Marcus Aurelius, we’re reading him saying to himself: “Hey you schmuck, why don’t you get your act together?” over and over again. And and you know then there’s also treatises like Hierocles’ Elements of Ethics. We’ve got a lot of material to work with, so we know that these were issues back in the day, although maybe not identified quite so much as such. And they’re issues for us.
So when I was thinking about this and just brainstorming, I came up with a list of ten. This is not the definitive or comprehensive list of stumbling blocks for people interested in practicing and understanding Stoicism, but I think you’ll see that these are pretty widespread and common problems. And they broke down for me into four categories
those that have to do primarily with people
those that have to do in particular with things
those that have to do with Stoicism itself understood as a philosophy of life an intentional way of living
and then, those that have to do with measure or perspective how we how we assess ourselves how we assess whether we’re making progress or not
And so I’m going to start with the ones with people, but I’m just going to read these off to you at the start, like in a bullet point form. So with people:
expectations that we have of non-Stoic others
disappointment with those that are identified as Stoics
and a temptation to evangelize in the wrong way
Those are the three that I’m going to talk about here. With things we have almost two opposed examples:
being too indifferent to indifferents is one of them
and then, bringing externals into one’s own stoicism is a second one
With Stoicism itself understood as a philosophy of life:
we have practices that aren’t working for somebody
we have expecting too much out of maxims
and then demanding too much out of a mere part of a larger system
And then finally when it comes to measure and perspective:
working on everything at once is a big problem that a lot of people fall into
and measuring our failures or plateaus in the wrong ways is is another similar problem as well
Stumbling Block 1: Expectations of Non-Stoic Others
So let’s talk about expectations of non-Stoic others. When we tell people that we have found this great thing called Stoicism, and it’s changing our life for the better, and we embrace it, there is often a tendency to tell other people about it and expect them to respect what we’re getting into. And that’s crazy because they’re not Stoics, so they’re more likely — as Epictetus says — he doesn’t say a “Stoic”, he says if you’re going to tell people that you’re a philosopher expect them to test, you expect them to try to provoke you. And if you do this in terms of Stoicism — in part because of the lower-case-s use of the word, where the “stoic” is supposed to be this stiff upper lip and never getting perturbed by anything — if you tell people that you’re you’re doing that, they are going to mess with you so that’s probably not a good idea.
On the other side, we often expect people — once we’ve seen the, you know, great wisdom and transformative powers of Stoicism — to embrace it themselves, even though they don’t have any stake in it. And sometimes this can be quite unfair or oppressive to other people. And it’s, as you’re going to see, that one of the common themes throughout all of these stumbling blocks is that it’s not prudent, it’s not a good exercise of wisdom, to adopt that kind of perspective. Why? Because Stoicism was developed by philosophers, philosophers who were living a life for a world of other human beings who are not themselves Stoics. And that’s the origin, that’s the context that will always most likely be the way things are, so it’s kind of imprudent to expect reality to change itself because we’ve adopted some perspective on reality.
It’s also very unfair to expect of other human beings what they can’t at this point in time deliver. So, I’ll give you a prime example. One of my students in a Medical Ethics class who was going through a lot of family difficulties — she’s also she’s actually a business major at one of the places I teach — she was having a lot of issues coming up and she tried to use the counseling services on campus, and found out that they really are just for show, and they would give her two sessions and that’s it (which seems to me pretty unfortunate and inhumane). And one of her business professors said this to her: “You know there’s this thing called Stoicism. You should look into it.” And didn’t say anything more. Is that a kind, beneficent, just way to treat another person? No, that’s that’s the opposite of it. Like throwing them out there and saying “go read some books and and it’ll sort you out,” when somebody is in genuine anguish.
Now you know if she did study Stoicism, it would help her with a lot of the things that she’s facing. But to demand that at the start of somebody is very you know. . . it’s quite imprudent. It’s actually foolish. Doing this — focusing on others rather than oneself — that’s that’s kind of problematic, right Especially if we’re beginners, we’re supposed to try to learn how not to pay attention to everybody else’s business, the things that are in their control, and to start paying attention to what’s in our control. So I think that this is one main source of stumbling blocks. People get much more obsessed with telling everybody else about Stoicism, and how they should be Stoics and how great it is, and they focus less on what they ought to be doing as Stoics
Stumbling Block 2: Disappointment With Other Stoics
Now what about people who are Stoics? We sometimes get disappointed with them, and we feel as if these great — and i’m going to use the word deliberately — idols that we’ve set on high have fallen down and broken. And how how could the philosophy be any good, if you know — here i’ll just take a prime example on twitter — Massimo Pigliucci sometimes gets a hard time from people who are like: “that’s not very Stoic of you to criticize another person, you know, or to call somebody an a-hole. I think sometimes it’s perfectly compatible if a person objectively is an a-hole, a jerk of a certain sort. I mean if you spent all day long tweeting about that that’s a problem, but calling out a person for their behavior strikes me as a matter of justice. You know it might even involve courage if you’re punching up and saying something to somebody who could actually hurt you. I mean not that you can actually be hurt on twitter, right, in any important way.
But we often see people who are held up as as prime examples being told that they’re letting other Stoics down. Now we should think about this. There aren’t any saviors in Stoicism. This is not Epicureanism where Epicurus is called Sotor, right? The Cynics had Hercules Sotor as well, and of course you know for Christians there’s there’s a savior figure. Stoicism doesn’t work that way. The sage is not a savior, and when do we actually run into sages? I mean according to the old stuff, every once every 500 years! We might not see a sage in our lifetime.
So who are we actually concerned with? The people that the Stoics identified as in Greek prokoptoi or in Latin proficientes, the people who are on the way. They’re making progress, hopefully, although progress very often looks like a step forward/step back/step forward/ step back. Less of a steady thing all the time. And so we probably want to keep that in mind.
And then somebody could say: “Yes. . . but they’re the representatives of Stoicism what about these people who are writing books, or you know doing podcasts, or they’re putting themselves forward as an ideal. Well they’re not actually, as far as I know, putting themselves forth as an ideal. If I take somebody else out there, I will pick one of my colleagues. I’ll pick somebody who, if any of you have had the privilege of knowing and interacting with, you would say: “well he’s he’s a good ways closer to sagehood than I’ll ever be”. And he’s a really great guy. That’s Christopher Gill
But Christopher Gill might have a bad day, and you know curse out some cab driver while I’m watching him. And then when I say “that’s not very Stoic,” if you turn on me with an angry face and shout me off the curb or something like that — I mean I have a hard time imagining Chris doing that, but anything could happen right? —if I myself expect some sort of perfection out of Chris Gill, I’m the foolish one, and I’m the one who’s allowing myself to be scandalized by doing that.
Epictetus in in his Discourses brings up how different people who he thinks are not quite sages but but at least on the way — Socrates, Zeno, Diogenes — each one of them had a very different approach. He tells us that Zeno stuck to teaching. Socrates went around questioning people. Diogenes basically got in people’s faces in a very aggressive way. And each one of these was a legitimate way of doing the sort of thing that Epictetus thought mattered for Stoicism. So that that’s a second potential stumbling block that we want to avoid.
Stumbling Block 3: Evangelizing For Stoicism In The Wrong Ways
A third is evangelizing or advocating Stoicism in the wrong way. I’m not against trying to spread good words about things, which is what you know evangelizing is at its core, but I think a lot of times people go about that the wrong way. And it’s understandable that if you found something that’s helpful for you in your life, you would want to share it with others. That is indeed part of beneficence, which is a part of justice, right?
But there is a tendency, I think ,among many people — not just in Stoicism but any sort of thing that improves your life, and it could be a philosophy, it could even be a diet or exercise — to say this works for me, so therefore it must work for you, and you should be doing this. Think about the advice that we get as soon as we tell somebody that we’re doing a new kind of exercise: “oh you should be lifting a different way, the way that I do it, the way that I think you should do it.
And so, I think a lot of evangelizing works like that. You know, taking cold showers is changing my life. You should all take cold showers too! What we need to do instead — it’s not that we can’t say “hey this is helpful, you should try this” — but we always have to exercise the reserve clause. We always have to say: “How invested am I getting in that person changing their mind and their behavior. I can communicate information to them. I don’t have to expect them to change to to suit me.
We also might want to keep in mind something else that Epictetus brought up with respect to Socrates. How often did Socrates succeed? Epictetus says it’s one in a thousand, right? Imagine if you were a doctor and you saved one out of a thousand of your patients. You probably wouldn’t stay a doctor very long. Fortunately the stakes are lower when you’re just talking to people, but you know, Socrates didn’t allow that to discourage him from from doing that. And we probably should expect about that sort of rate of rate of return as well.
We want to think, if we if we’re going to communicate with people about Stoicism we want to practice the virtues. so it’s not just about courage being bold enough to tell the story. it’s also about prudence. how do we talk to people um do we do it in the right way at the right time presenting things in the amount that people can take in sometimes waiting and not saying anything is the most pro most prudent thing to do justice.
This is also where once again the expectations of non-stoic others if somebody is really struggling somebody is really suffering somebody is dealing with difficult stuff merely telling them they should practice stoicism does not strike me as a a just way to behave it’s actually quite cruel instead what we can do is create opportunities for people to learn about stoicism but then like i said before we have to exercise that reserve clause we have to realize that they have to see the point to it we can’t force that on them
Stumbling Block 4: Being Too Indifferent to Indifferents
When we turn to thinking about things, the whole world of things that we’re involved in, a big stumbling block for Stoics is this notion of “indifferents” (with a “ts”) rather than indifference as an attitude. They both come from the same Greek adiaphoria the things that literally don’t make a difference right
A prime example of this is the amount of hairs on your head — whether it’s even or odd — that’s one of the examples that Diogenes Laertes and Arius Didymus both give. Another very interesting example — the color of one’s skin. The Stoics in ancient times thought that that doesn’t really matter at all That’s a total indifferent. It’s neither good nor bad. Because they had very different understandings of ethnicity, race, markers for that than we unfortunately do it in our world, right? So that that might be something to follow up on down the line.
Indifferents do in fact matter from a Stoic perspective. There was a Stoic who was a renegade, who gets talked about by Cicero and and by Diogenes Laertes, who said that the indifferents, we just don’t care about them at all, right? That’s not the position of Zeno, or the later Stoics who we study. Indifferents do matter. They just don’t matter as much as virtue and vice, or happiness and misery. So wealth does matter. Poverty does matter it just doesn’t matter enough to make you happy or miserable or a good person or a bad person.
I think a lot of people, when they learn about Stoicism, they wind up taking an all-or-nothing approach, where they they express themselves saying things like it’s Stoic — there was a thing on Twitter about this a while back — it’s really Stoic to not give a f**k about anything. Well that’s completely wrong! You know, that would be imprudent. That would be unjust. That’s not even courageous, because courage in the real sense means you resisting things, and standing up for things, and combating for the things that that really do in fact matter. And some of those might be indifferents.
Because as Epictetus points out to, us things that are indifferent or external to us things, that are outside our control — how we deal with them, how we make use of them (the khresis in Greek) really does matter, and is up to us, and is a matter for prohairesis, for our choice about things. So we really we do want to think about how we maintain this kind of tension, right?Clearly the indifferent do matter to some degree. How do we determine when they matter, why they matter? Well that’s where the things that that are more valuable have to come into play, like the virtues, which include prudence.
Stumbling Block 5: Bringing Externals Into Your Stoicism
There’s a there’s an opposite sort of scandal I think that people do, which trips themselves up. And they don’t realize it as a way in which they’re deviating themselves from from where they want to go. That’s bringing externals into their Stoicism itself. Getting too concerned about things that don’t really matter, as if they’re part of their Stoic practice, and some of that we’re going to get to a little bit later when we talk about proper measure
I think a great example of this is “Stoic” merch and tattoos. People think that if they buy themselves a challenge coin — which is a weird practice anyway (there’s a whole other conversation to have about how challenge coins, which were a rarity when I was in the the US military, have become you this inflated sign that almost anybody can get their hands on) — having a coin of any sort doesn’t make you any more Stoic. It might be a useful aid to memory But you know what would be an even more useful aid to memory? Remembering stuff in your head! Developing a practice where you don’t actually need to have something in your pocket to whip out, and display your connection with the Stoic community.
A lot of people get get tattoos, and I see a lot of posts about this. And I’m not saying that this is a terrible thing or anything, but it really does lose perspective. There’s nothing about putting ink on an indifferent — which is your body according to Stoicism traditionally understood — that is going to make you more Stoic right? And it doesn’t matter whether you write it in Greek or Latin, or English or Norwegian, or pick whatever you want — I mean. . . do pick a language that you know, because otherwise you’ll be like those people who get characters, like Chinese characters, and it spells like a menu item or something, and then you look kind of silly. But merch, tattoos — those are things that apply to the indifferents.
I think there’s a lot of people as well who do focus on more on belonging, and signaling, and social status within the Stoic community, and less about their own practice. You know, this is this is a way of shifting concern outward into the world where you’re likely to be disappointed. This this lays you up for some of those other things like thinking that Stoic figures are somehow saintly types — I mean, even saints understood in Christian context, a lot of them were kind of kind of flawed characters too right? So Stoic prokoptoi are going to be as well.
The last thing that I think falls under there — and some people might not be happy to hear this — is buying books. You can have too many books. Seneca says this explicitly. Unless you’re actually reading the books, and they’re the right books — because there’s a lot of good books and a lot of bad books out there on on Stoicism — you’re not actually improving yourself. You’re not helping your Stoic practice and internalized philosophy by putting books on a shelf.
Lucian (who who is not a Stoic) — Lucian of Samosata — has a very funny piece called the “Ignorant Book Buyer”, and it’s about a guy who lines his study with all these books that he’s buying, and thinks that simply acquiring them, by force of osmosis or ownership, is going to make him a smarter guy. And he’s he’s as ignorant as you could possibly be. I think some people do that at times with with Stoicism, and like I said, this is this is a stumbling block where people trip themselves up while they’re actually thinking they’re doing a good thing for themselves.
Stumbling Block 6: Practices That Don’t Work For You
What about Stoicism itself? So Stoicism is a practical philosophy. There are what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” (most people just call them “philosophical practices”) that you engage in, ranging from identifying what’s in your control and what’s not in your control, to negative visualization to voluntary discomfort. You all know the whole gamut of these sorts of things. Practices don’t always work for everybody.
I take cold showers but I don’t do it as a matter of course to toughen myself up, because you know I usually take a cold shower when I get out of the sauna at the gym, because it’s nice to cool down. You know, the same practice can do very different things. There’s a dialectic between practice and study and reflection. The more practice you do, it helps you understand Stoic philosophy. And then the Stoic philosophy should be informing the practice, and they should be building off of each other. Doing practices just by themselves, just for the sake of doing practices, is not really Stoicism.
John Sellars points this out in an interview that we did with him on the Wisdom for Life radio show a while back, and it was really great to hear him say that that just doing practices is not enough. There’s also kind of a relativity to practices. Not every practice is for every person, and if you try a practice and it doesn’t work out for you, that doesn’t mean that Stoicism has failed. And it doesn’t even mean necessarily that you have failed, or that you’re doing it wrong, right? It could mean that that practice is just not going to ever pay off for you, or it’s not going to pay off at this point in time, or you’re not in the right kind of situation for it.
Some people shouldn’t do negative visualization — Donald Robertson has pointed this out. When it comes to people who have been, you know, terribly traumatized — if you are dealing with some really deep rooted trauma from abuse — then trying to think about the thing that’s a trigger for you might not be the best idea to do at this point in time. So even negative visualization, which gets gets recommended as a universal panacea, it’s not that. You have to be again prudent in in which practices you take on.
Another important aspect that we’re going to talk a little bit more about later, routines. Stoic routines, practice routines, can in fact become routine. They can become mindless and stale, and then they’re probably not going to be helping you out, and you have to reassess over and over again. So I think that putting practices in a proper perspective is very important for avoiding this particular stumbling block on the other side.
Stumbling Block 7: Expecting Too Much Out Of Maxims
So we have practices — things that you do. We have things that you say, or things that you read, or things that you think — maxims, right? What we nowadays call “quotes,” passages that are taken out of texts. Some of them are recommended by people like Epictetus when he says “have ready at hand, when you get into this sort of situation, to say to yourself ‘x y z’”. Marcus is in fact saying those things to himself in the Meditations. Seneca has a whole letter about these, which I highly recommend to all of you, where somebody is asking him for quotes and he says: “I’m not gonna give you any for for these reasons here” . . . and then he relents, and says: “Oh why not? I’ll give you a few!” and he gives gives them some.
Maxims, just like practices, are contextual. They are not helpful for every single situation. You have to understand the maxim in order for it to be of any use to you. They require unpacking. There’s a lot of quotes out there that people like to post, and to write down for themselves, and to repeat to themselves. Seneca is super clear about this. Without some sort of connection to the larger Stoic system, they’re losing most of their efficacy, and some of them can actually be dangerous or damaging to you if you’re misusing them. You know, telling yourself for example, as you go through a bad breakup, that “this appearance is nothing to me” — that’s probably not going to be good for you right? So you want to be prudent in how you use your maxims. Some of them actually need a lot of unpacking.
A great example is “the obstacle is the way”. Is the obstacle really the way in every single case? Sometimes the obstacle is just the obstacle, you know, and sometimes you would be foolish to keep on butting your head against that particular obstacle. Sometimes you want to go around the obstacle — that might be the way. But the obstacle itself isn’t the way. So we can do this with all sorts of other Stoic passages, quotes, maxims, whatever you want to call them. We need to be rational as we’re thinking them through and applying them, rather than just parroting them as if they’re going to magically help us.
Stumbling Block 8: Making Too Much Of Mere Parts
And this leads to another sort of source of stumbling blocks. People will seize upon parts of Stoicism as if it’s the totality of Stoicism. The best example of this is the dichotomy of control. I’ve seen people saying Stoicism, you know, the foundation of it or the essence of Stoicism is the dichotomy of control. That shows up very very late in Stoic philosophy — the first person to explicitly formulate it Epictetus right? We don’t know if it was in some of the classic Stoics like Zeno and Chrysippus — it might have been. We see things sort of like it in Cicero describing Stoicism. We see some things like it in Seneca. In the Epitome of Stoic Ethics and in Diogenes Laertes, we don’t see an emphasis on the dichotomy of control. So we should be really wary in that case and in other cases of saying this is the only thing that counts, this is the cornerstone.
As Seneca tells us Stoicism is a complex system. It’s better to think of it less as a single star and more like an entire constellation, and not a not a simple one like the big dipper but a really complicated one. Or you might think of it like a mosaic, where you need all these different pieces in the composition. Now that might lead to some dismay. You say: “Well I haven’t read all the Stoic texts”, or “How am I going to learn all of this stuff?” And you know, it’s something that we grow into. It’s something that we build within ourselves. You can have a more and a less, but you don’t want to hold yourself back by saying “I’ve got it figured out,” “I’ve got everything that I need.”
Stumbling Block 9: Working on Everything at Once
Now we come to the last two, and here we’re dealing with things that have to do with how we measure our success, and how we how we plan things out. It’s a big mistake recognized not just by Stoics but also by other authors — a prime example of this is John Cassian, one of the great monastic writers in the west. Working on everything at once — thinking that you’re gonna change every single part of yourself — is setting yourself up for failure. You can generally only work on a bit of yourself at a time, and this is in part because as Epictetus teaches us, we are prohairesis — we are our “faculty of choice” — and “prohairesis compels prohairesis”. You are using a higher part of yourself to look at, to un-screw-up that very part of yourself, so you can’t change it all at once. You have to be selective on what you’re going to work on, and forgiving with yourself for all of your screw-ups when it comes to other things
So if your big thing is anger management, but you also ought to exercise some temperance in eating and drinking, maybe work on the anger management first. And after you’ve actually got that halfway down, now you can start worrying about dieting and exercise, and not having fifth helpings at the buffet or whatever it’s going to be. And we could we could do it vice-versa with that as well. But you you really can’t do everything at once, and if you try to you’re going to fail, and you’re going to feel really bad about it. And it will probably lead you away from yet one more failed system that you’ve invested in for a while.
Stumbling Block 10: Mismeasuring Failures or Plateaus
The last thing is measuring failure or plateaus. We’re all going to screw up and you know again the classic stoics they talk about this they all say that they’ve screwed up. Marcus is actually haranguing himself sometimes. We want to keep this in proper perspective. We don’t want to hide things from ourselves — “Oh I didn’t really screw up,” or “the great thing that I’m going to do tomorrow will totally make up for this”. I think many of many of us have fallen into that trap. I know I certainly have. But we’re not just simply going back to square one, you know. We build up practice over a while, and we change ourselves gradually. So reminding ourselves that when we fail we have the opportunity to not fail the next time, and to make something of it, can help take some stress off of ourselves.
Sometimes when we’ve been practicing for a while, we feel like we hit a plateau, and we’re just idling along. Travis Hume — the Applying Stoicism organizer — he and I have been talking about this for a while. I told him about the concept of the “dark night of the soul”. You know, spiritual progress. This is something that the Stoics didn’t themselves thematize that much, but I think it is really quite common — you’ve actually made some progress, and now you’re just kind of idling along. Well you’re not just idling along if you’re still reading, you’re still thinking, you’re still behaving, you’re still choosing, you are slowly growing something within yourself, and you can remind yourself of that. If you don’t, there’s a tendency to say “Ah this is just boring routine. Why should i keep doing this?” And that’s allowing yourself to be scandalized, allowing yourself to have impediments thrown in your way.
So those are the ten that I thought were worth talking about. There’s lots of other ways — like an infinite amount of ways, if Aristotle is right — that we can go wrong. But I thought those those might be common helpful ones that — I saw a lot of nodding heads! — a lot of us can relate. I’ve done probably all of them at one point in time, not necessarily with Stoicism, but at least with something. I’m willing to bet that quite a few of you have as well, and so I look forward to you know digging into this a bit deeper as we we continue our conversation. I’ve talked at you enough. Thanks for coming along for the ride on this, and hopefully it’s been helpful for you!