The Practice: Six cars ahead

On Saturday, we took the kids to a fun park in Cardiff. Thirteen slides, a bouncy-castle area, about fifty pounds for the family.

In the bouncy area, children were running up the slides and sitting in places where someone could easily land on them. I couldn’t see a member of staff anywhere.

I felt tense almost immediately. Then stressed. Then slightly panicked. My kids are going to get hurt.

But I didn’t stop there.

They’re money-grabbing. They’re incompetent. This place is rubbish. They don’t know how to run it. Someone needs to put them straight.

The facts were that children were playing unsafely, I couldn’t see any staff, and I was worried about my own children. The rest was mine.

I had paid good money. I had expected something better. They had let me down.

Even as the judgement was forming, part of me could hear myself adding it.

The source

Epictetus, Enchiridion 5, in Elizabeth Carter’s translation: “Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.” The line is quoted so often it has gone soft, but the structure underneath it is sharp. There is the thing that happened, and there is the opinion you added, and the second one is doing almost all of the work. Epictetus is not saying the event does not matter. He is saying that if you cannot tell the two apart, you will keep treating your own additions as facts about the world, and defending them accordingly.

The drill

Three columns, one real event a day. Left: what happened, in the plainest words you can manage, the version a camera would agree with. Middle: what you added on top, in the exact words you used in your head, not the tidied version. Right: what is left of the problem if the middle column were deleted. Do it for something small. The petty ones are more instructive than the serious ones, because the addition is easier to see when the stakes are low and harder to justify afterwards.

From the archives

Long before that afternoon in Cardiff I made a whole episode about this exact mechanism, and I still needed reminding. Overthinking Is Not a Thinking Problem goes through phantasia, the Stoic account of impressions, and three ways to catch the judgement before it spirals.

Run the three columns once this week. Hit reply with what was in your middle column.

Go well,
Jon.