An End to Comparison
This week you are going to learn about what the Stoics called "an end to comparison," the practice of withdrawing your attention from how your life measures up against other people's lives and redirecting it entirely toward your own inner condition. The Greek word that sits at the heart of this practice is prohairesis (say it: pro-HIGH-reh-sis), which means your capacity for deliberate choice, the faculty that belongs to you alone and cannot be taken or given away. When you stop measuring yourself against others, you discover that prohairesis is the only thing worth tending, and that tending it is already enough.
Passage
“How,” you ask, “can this be accomplished?” By constant effort, and by doing nothing without the approval of reason. And if you are willing to hear her voice, she will say to you: “Abandon those pursuits which heretofore have caused you to run hither and thither. Abandon riches, which are either a danger or a burden to the possessor. Abandon the pleasures of the body and of the mind; they only soften and weaken you. Abandon your quest for office; it is a swollen, idle, and empty thing, a thing that has no goal, as anxious to see no one outstrip it as to see no one at its heels. It is afflicted with envy, and in truth with a twofold envy; and you see how wretched a man’s plight is if he who is the object of envy feels envy also.”
— Seneca, Letters 84.11
Reflection
Seneca describes a person enslaved to the quest for office and recognition, and he makes a detail vivid that is easy to miss: that person is afflicted with a twofold envy. They envy those ahead of them and they fear being surpassed by those behind. This is what comparison produces when you follow it all the way: you are squeezed from both directions at once, and there is no position on the ladder that resolves it. Reason, Seneca says, is the exit. Not discipline in the white-knuckled sense, but the steady voice that asks: is this actually what I want, or is this what comparison has convinced me I need? Listening to that voice is the daily work.
Go deeper
Where in your life are you experiencing the twofold envy Seneca describes, anxious about someone ahead and someone behind at the same time, and what would reason say to you if you stopped long enough to hear it?
Practice
The Voice of Reason
Identify one area of your life where you feel squeezed by comparison in both directions. Spend ten minutes writing as if reason were speaking to you directly, in plain sentences, about this area. What would reason actually say? What would it tell you to abandon, and what would it tell you is worth keeping? Write it in second person, as if reason is addressing you.