I want to tell you something about the difference between less and none, because I think it matters more than it sounds.
There's a school of thought — reasonable, humane, widely held — that says the wise person isn't free from fear or grief or desire, just less afflicted by them. More moderate. Better at managing. The passions are still there, but tamed, softened, kept to a tolerable level. On first hearing this sounds like wisdom. On reflection it's a significant concession dressed up as a reasonable position.
Here's my problem with it: passions don't stay at the level you let them in at. They grow with their causes. Fear of a distant thing becomes something manageable; fear of the same thing as it approaches becomes something else entirely. You haven't controlled the fear — you've just been lucky about the proximity of what you fear. The moment circumstances intensify, the moderated passion reveals it was never truly moderated. It was just untested.
It is easier to keep a thing out than to keep it under after you have let it in.
The real question isn't whether you feel fear, but what you've decided deserves it. A person who has genuinely reclassified what is and isn't an evil — who knows in their bones that pain, poverty, imprisonment, and death are not the worst things that can happen to a person — doesn't experience less fear of these things. They experience something closer to indifference, because the category of threat has been reorganized. This isn't madness. It's clarity. The things most people spend their lives dreading are real, but they are not evil in the sense that matters. Only losing yourself — only capitulating, betraying what you know is right, surrendering your freedom to whatever's threatening you — that's the thing worth being afraid of.
This is a difficult position to hold. I won't pretend otherwise. But notice what the alternative actually offers: a wise person who is brave except when things get dangerous, calm except when circumstances press hard, free from sadness except when sadness arrives. That's not wisdom. That's just a person who hasn't been sufficiently tested yet.
There's a passage I keep returning to about the pilot in the storm. The argument goes: surely the storm harms the pilot, because it prevents him from completing the voyage. And the response is that the storm doesn't harm his art — it only prevents the voyage's success. The storm is actually where his skill becomes visible. Anyone can steer on a calm sea.
The wise person is something like this. Fortune blocking you, constraining you, taking away the obvious tools — this doesn't interrupt the work. It is the work. The sculptor Phidias made statues from ivory when he had ivory, and from bronze when he had bronze, and from whatever else was available — and the quality wasn't in the material. It was in him. The wise person does the same with circumstance. Whatever fortune provides, they work with. Whatever it withholds, they work around. The capacity doesn't leave.
What I'm saying, and I mean it personally as much as philosophically: the goal isn't to become someone who suffers less. It's to become someone who has stopped mistaking the wrong things for suffering. You'll still feel pain — that doesn't go away, and I wouldn't trust anyone who claimed otherwise. But fear, that other thing, that anticipatory dread of what fortune might take — that can be addressed at the root, by doing the slow work of deciding what actually matters.
He makes use of evils. Whatever fortune he finds, he will accomplish something noteworthy from it.
I want that for both of us. Not fearlessness as performance. Real reclassification. The hard, patient, lifelong kind.
Still working on it alongside you,