Situations, circumstances, what other people say and think—these things cannot inherently affect you. You’re made no different by them. By themselves, they’re powerless. They need your interpretation to have any effect.
Ryan Holiday put it like this: if someone sends you a scathing email, but you never see it, it wouldn’t affect you, right? That’s because the power of an external thing, like an email or contentious remark, depends entirely on your awareness of it and your opinion about it.
Epictetus said that your impression of an external thing is a value judgment. So if you blame someone for being rude to you, realize you’re blaming your own judgment.
Whoa.
Epictetus also kept a sense of humor about it. If someone insulted him, he’d say, ‘Well, thank goodness they don’t know about my other faults, or they’d really have something to say!’
When a man collided with Marcus Cato (a senator of the first century BC and Stoic Philosopher, revered as the most ethically wise philosopher since Socrates) in a public bath, he apologized afterward for his insolence. Cato replied that he didn’t remember being bumped. “It is the mark of a great mind,” Seneca said, “to disregard injuries.”
This is similar to another (and perhaps better) technique Epictetus used to handle an insult: he would forget about it—because it didn’t concern him. It concerned the person who said it.
“Choose not to be harmed,” said Marcus Aurelius, “and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.”