The Daily Stoic

Seneca tells the story of the philosopher Crates, who was walking in Athens when he saw a young man talking to no one around. “What are you doing?” Crates asked. “I am talking to myself,” the man replied. “Be careful,” Crates told him, “for you are communing with a bad man!” Whether this young man was in fact a bad kid or not, Seneca doesn’t say. One suspects Crates was joking—unless it was his practice to go around insulting complete strangers. Or it may have been that Crates was referring less to the quality of that stranger’s soul and was instead making a more general point about the dialogues we are all prone to having with ourselves—conversations that are hardly productive or healthy. The writer Anne Lamott spoke of a radio station, KFKD (K-Fucked) which plays in far too many our heads:Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble o