The situation
You posted something. Or someone else posted something about you. Either way, the response is now happening at scale. Strangers are saying things. Some are reasonable, some are absurd, some are vicious. Your phone keeps buzzing. The temptation is constant — to read more, to reply to one of them, to defend yourself, to delete it, to disappear.
The move
The view from above, used surgically. These are strangers. They will not remember this in a week. Most of them will not remember it in a day. The vast majority will never have thought about you before this and will never think about you after. The intensity of the response is a feature of how the medium works, not a feature of how seriously the words are meant. Meditations 9.30 was written for this.
The dichotomy. Up to you: whether to look, whether to reply, whether to learn anything from the legitimate criticisms that may be embedded in the noise. Not up to you: what strangers think, how the algorithm propagates it, whether the moment ends today or tomorrow. The first column is small and tractable. The second column is enormous and out of your hands. The discipline is to put your attention only in the first column and refuse to leak into the second.
The reserve clause, here, is on yourself: I will share my work — circumstances permitting. You knew the noise was a possibility. The noise has arrived. The noise will pass. The work remains.
Source grounding
Marcus, Meditations 4.3: the retreat into yourself is always available. The phone makes it harder, because the temptation to keep checking is engineered. But the Stoic move is the same. Put the phone down. Do something with your hands. Read a paragraph of something that has lasted longer than a thousand years. Return to the noise, if you must, having been somewhere else for an hour.
Meditations 9.30: how many know not even thy name, and how many will soon forget it. The cosmic scale clears the local weather. The hundred strangers attacking you are a hundred people. The seven billion not attacking you are seven billion. The intensity is local; the proportion is not.
Seneca, Letter 7, on the crowd: to consort with the crowd is harmful. Seneca's diagnosis was already accurate before the algorithmic version. The mob does not change your views by argument; it changes them by atmosphere. Spend less time in the atmosphere.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 33: choose your standard. The crowd is not your standard. The crowd has never been your standard. The standard is what a person of good character would do here — and the answer is rarely engage with all of them.
What the popular version misses
- Don't care. Wrong instruction. Some of the criticism may be legitimate, and the Stoic engages with legitimate criticism. The discipline is to discriminate between the criticism that contains information and the noise that does not, and to engage only with the former.
- Be above it. This is what people say when they have not yet practiced not being affected. The Stoic does not have to be above it. The Stoic has to handle it — which is more modest and more achievable.
The commitment
Two specific things. (1) Set a window — twenty minutes today, twenty minutes tomorrow — for looking at the response. Outside the window, the phone is in another room. (2) Find one piece of criticism that contains information, and write down what you will actually do about it. Then close the window and do something else. The deliberateness of the window is what differentiates engagement from being driven by the noise.