The Problem of What Others Think

In a letter from Seneca to his friend Lucilius, he writes:

“It’s the height of madness to worry about being despised by the despicable.”

One of the great causes of suffering is this maddening worry about what others think of us. I can go into its causes by pointing to evolutionary psychology and our hunter-gatherer roots, but that’s neither novel nor interesting. Rather, I want to…