“It’s possible, Marcus Aurelius said, to not have an opinion. You don’t have to turn this into something, he reminds himself. You don’t have to let this upset you. You don’t have to think something about everything. Do you need to have an opinion about the scandal of the moment–is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if this person likes music that sounds weird to you? So what if that person is a vegetarian? ‘These things are not asking to be judged by you,’ Marcus writes. ‘Leave them alone.’ Especially because these opinions often make us miserable! ‘It’s not things that upset us,’ Epictetus says, ‘it’s our opinions about things.’ The fewer opinions you have, especially about other people and things outside your control, the happier you will be. The nicer you’ll be to be around, too. Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t have any opinions at all, but that we should save our judgments for what matters—right and wrong, justice and injustice, what is moral and what is not. If we spend our energy forming opinions about every trivial annoyance, we’ll have none left for the things that actually matter.”

Ryan Holiday