"We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like."
Most of us, after all, are obsessed with other people's opinions of us: We work hard, first to win the admiration of other people and then to avoid losing it.
One way to overcome this obsession, the Stoics think, is to realize that in order to win the admiration of other people, we will have to adopt their values. More precisely, we will have to live a life that is successful according to their notion of success. (If we are living what they take to be an unsuccessful life, they will have no reason to admire us.) Consequently, before we try to win the admiration of these other people, we should stop to ask whether their notion of success is compatible with ours. More important, we should stop to ask whether these people, by pursuing whatever it is they value, are gaining the tranquility we seek. If they aren't, we should be more than willing to forgo their admiration.
Another way to overcome our obsession with winning the admiration of other people is to go out of our way to do things likely to trigger their disdain. Along these lines, Cato made a point of ignoring the dictates of fashion: When everyone was wearing light purple, he wore dark, and although ancient Romans normally went out in public wearing shoes and a tunic, Cato wore neither. According to Plutarch, Cato did this not because he "sought vainglory"; to the contrary, he dressed differently in order to accustom himself "to be ashamed only of what was really shameful, and to ignore men's low opinion of other things."' In other words, Cato consciously did things to trigger the disdain of other people simply so he could practice ignoring their disdain.
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