No One Can Actually Insult You
Epictetus says something that sounds absurd until you sit with it: “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.” The guy’s been insulted and his reply is basically: he doesn’t even know the half of it. Under the joke is the doctrine — what wounds you in an insult isn’t the words, it’s your agreement with them. Pull the agreement and the wound has nothing to land on.
His sharper version: it’s not the person reviling you who harms you, but your judgment that you’ve been harmed. The insult is just sound waves and intent until your own head picks it up, signs off on it, and converts it to damage. So the power was never really the insulter’s. It was yours, at the moment you decided to be hurt — a decision so fast it doesn’t feel like a decision, which is exactly why it’s worth slowing down to catch.
For anyone who builds in public this isn’t abstract. The second you ship a thing, post a thing, make a thing, you get reviled — critics, competitors, strangers, the algorithm’s cruelest 1%. If your stability rides on none of that landing, you’ll get jerked around forever, and worse, you’ll start pre-censoring your work to dodge the sting, which is how builders slowly get boring. The criticism becomes a leash. You stop making the things that might get attacked, which are usually the only things worth making.
Epictetus offers a real escape, two moves. One: most criticism is information about the critic — his fears, his envy, his bad day, the thing he can’t build himself. Read it that way and it stops being a verdict and becomes a data point about someone else. Two, harder: where the criticism is true, you don’t need to be wounded, you need to be grateful, because someone just handed you a free defect report. Thank the accurate critic, ignore the rest, and the wound disappears in both directions. True or false, nothing left to bleed about.
To be precise, because this gets misread as thick skin or not caring: it’s the opposite of not caring. Epictetus cared enormously about doing the work well. The move is to stop outsourcing your read on the work’s quality to the loudest available stranger. Keep your own honest assessment, let accurate feedback in the front door, and decline to let the rest set up residence in your head rent-free. The gate is yours. They can knock; you decide who enters.
So when something stings now I try to catch the fast invisible step — the sign-off — and look at it. Is this true. If yes, fix the thing and thank the source. If no, it’s weather, and weather isn’t an insult, it’s just a fact about the sky. Either way no wound, because I never signed off on one.
They can say it. Only you can make it land.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.