Good day, Stoics. 🫡
You can be lonely in a house with four other people in it.
If loneliness were about the number of humans nearby, the cure would be simple, and it isn’t.
What is missing is not company.
📋 IN TODAY’S ISSUE
Why more people in the room does not fix it
Around you versus knowing you
Seneca on telling somebody a thing before you have finished thinking it
The part of this that is maintained rather than inflicted
The Unedited Sentence, which you can send today
🎯 THE LESSON
What is missing is being known.
There is a difference between people who are around you and people to whom you have said something true.
Most of us have plenty of the first kind. It is the second kind that is thin.
And here is the part worth being honest about.
That thinness is usually maintained, not inflicted.
You can be surrounded by people who would know you if you let them.
The reasons make sense from the inside. It is a bad time. They have got their own things. It is too much to get into.
So you give the short version, and the short version is fine, and nothing happens.
Then you feel unknown, which is accurate, and you conclude it is about them.
⚖️ AROUND YOU VS KNOWING YOU
Around you. People who could describe your job, your schedule and your opinions. This is most people, and it is not nothing.
Knowing you. People who have heard a sentence from you that you had not finished thinking yet. This is usually one or two, and sometimes none.
The second list is not built by spending more time. It is built by saying one thing you would normally edit out.
📜 STOIC LINE OF THE DAY
“Consider him a loyal friend, and you will make him loyal. Share with a friend at least all your worries and reflections.”
💭 GOING DEEPER
That line has a strange structure and it is worth slowing down on.
Consider him a loyal friend, and you will make him loyal.
Seneca is saying the trust comes first and produces the friendship, not the other way around.
Most of us run it backwards. We wait until we feel close enough, and then we would share.
On his account that is a queue that never moves, because the sharing was the thing that would have made you close.
Somebody has to go first, and it is going to have to be you, because they are reading the same advice.
❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY
Who would know me if I let them, and what have I been giving them the short version of?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
⏳ THE UNEDITED SENTENCE
Pick one person already in your life. Not a new friend. An old one.
Think of the thing you have been giving them the short version of.
Send them one sentence of the long version. Not the whole thing. One sentence, today.
The loneliness is often one uncomfortable conversation away from ending. Not a new person. A realer sentence to somebody who has been there the whole time.
Stay steady. ⚔️
🔗 KEEP GOING
If today’s lesson hit, read this one next: Who Are You Without an Audience?.
📚 MARCUS’S BOOKS
Three books now, and they all came out of this newsletter.
Stoic 30. The 30 day challenge in print, with room to write down what you actually did.
The Stoic 30 Journal. 365 questions, one a day, for when you want to keep going.
The Stoic Reset Book. Seven short programs for the weeks you’ve drifted.
All three are on Amazon, in paperback and on Kindle.
