Marcus Aurelius caught himself holding two things at once and could not make them agree. He loved himself more than he loved anybody else. He also trusted his own opinion of himself less than he trusted other people’s opinion of him. He had a test for it.
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. If then a god or a wise teacher should present himself to a man and bid him to think of nothing and to design nothing which he would not express as soon as he conceived it, he could not endure it even for a single day. So much more respect have we to what our neighbours shall think of us than to what we shall think of ourselves.
The test is the thought you do not say. Not the secrets, and not plain courtesy — the ordinary half-second of trimming that sits between having a thought and letting it out. Forbid the trimming and you could not last a day. So something is being consulted in that half-second, and it is not your own view of the matter. It is a picture of what the other person will be left holding.
Leave the verdict outside you and it never arrives. The neighbours are not one person. They are assembled out of several, none of them actually asked, and the composite has no opinion to give. The question of how you are doing stays permanently open, and the trimming has no end point, because there is nobody there to hear the result and say yes, that will do.
Keep the verdict yourself and you have to look. That is the cost of it. Nobody comes and tells you. You form a view of yourself from the inside, out of what you actually did and actually thought, with no applause attached and no appeal.
Not caring what anyone thinks is the same mirror with the sign reversed. The neighbours are still setting the agenda and you are answering them with a refusal. It also costs you the one thing other people are genuinely good for, which is telling you something true about yourself that you had no way to see.
So what are we aiming at. We want our own opinion of ourselves to be the one that carries the weight. Not a flattering one and not a harsh one. A looked-at one — the opinion of someone who was actually there.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Someone asks how your weekend was, and there is a half-second where you pick which version of it to give.
- You finish a message and read it over once more before it goes.
- Somebody at home says something, you have an answer ready, and a shorter one comes out instead.
One thing to watch in all three: which way the edit went. Was it made for the person in front of you, or for the picture of you they will be left holding.
You are not deciding anything in that half-second, and you are not trying to say the untrimmed thing. Watch which way the edit went, and leave it as it is.