Good day, Stoics.
Widen the circle.
It’s easy to care about the people closest to us.
Our family. Our friends. The people who think like us, live like us, and make sense to us.
The Stoic Hierocles pictured our relationships as a series of circles. Close to the center are the people nearest to us. Farther out are neighbors, fellow citizens, strangers, and eventually the rest of humanity.
The practice was to draw those outer circles inward.
In other words, don’t reserve your humanity only for the people who’ve earned a place close to you.
The impatient cashier.
The difficult coworker.
The stranger holding up traffic.
The person whose life you understand very little about.
This doesn’t mean trusting everyone equally or abandoning good judgment. It means remembering that justice, patience, and decency aren’t supposed to stop at the edge of our personal circle.
Stoicism asks us to become better not only at governing ourselves, but at living well among other people.
So today, widen the circle a little.
Treat one person who feels distant from you with the consideration you’d normally reserve for someone closer.
Not because they’ve earned it.
Because your character calls for it.
Stay steady.