What will people think?
Stoic wisdom, evolutionary biology, and the path to inner sovereignty.
“If it should ever happen to you to be turned to externals in order to please some person, you must know that you have lost your purpose in life. Be satisfied in everything with being a philosopher. If you wish to seem also to any person to be a philosopher, appear so to yourself… ”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion 23 (Matheson translation)
There’s something radical about Epictetus’ insight here, something that cuts against nearly every instinct evolution has encoded in us. We live in an age of metrics, of likes and shares, of performance reviews and social media engagement. We are constantly, relentlessly being measured, and we’ve internalized the measuring stick. The question “What will people think?” has become so automatic that we rarely notice ourselves asking it anymore.
Of course, this automaticity is not accidental. For our ancestors, social exclusion was often a death sentence. Natural selection ruthlessly favored those who were exquisitely attuned to the opinions of their group. Our brains evolved sophisticated mechanisms for tracking reputation, detecting social threats, and modulating behavior to maintain standing within the tribe. The neural circuitry for social pain (e.g., the sting of rejection, the fear of disapproval) runs through some of the same pathways as physical pain, because for most of human history, they posed equivalent threats to survival and reproduction.
But Epictetus, writing from the vantage point of ancient Stoic philosophy, points to something more modern, more divorced from the stark realities of animal existence. The moment you turn outward to please others, when you need their approval to feel justified, you’ve already given away something precious. You’ve compromised your prohairesis (your moral character and capacity for choice) not because you’ve done something wrong, necessarily, but because you’ve made someone else’s judgment the final arbiter of your own understanding of what’s right.
The Stoics understood, perhaps more clearly than we sometimes do, that human nature contains both what evolution has given us and what reason can make of us. We are animals shaped by ancestral environments, yes, but we are also rational beings capable of examining and transcending our inherited impulses.
While reputation has always mattered in social life, Stoicism emerged precisely as a critique of this tendency, in both ancient and modern contexts. To understand why Epictetus’s teaching requires such effort, we must first understand what we’re working against.
From an evolutionary perspective, status-seeking and approval-seeking are selected features. In the small-scale societies where humans evolved, your reputation directly determined your access to mates, allies, resources, and protection. A damaged reputation could mean exile, which often meant death. Natural selection doesn’t care about your inner peace or philosophical consistency; it cares only about whether you survive long enough to reproduce and whether your children do the same.
This created what evolutionary psychologists call “audience effects” (i.e., the profound shift in our behavior when we know we’re being observed). Studies show that people behave more generously, more fairly, and more pro-socially when they believe others are watching, even when the “watchers” are just stylized eye-spots on a wall. Our brains are constantly running simulations: What will they think? How will this affect my standing? Am I being judged right now?
These mechanisms served our ancestors well in environments where the “they” was a stable group of perhaps 50-150 individuals who you’d interact with for life, where reputation tracked actual character reasonably well over time, and where social feedback contained genuine information about your contribution to the group.
But Epictetus warns that turning to externals to please others signifies a loss of one’s purpose in life, what the Stoics called prohairesis (the faculty of moral choice). Doing so isn’t primarily a psychological wound; it’s a categorical error in judgment. You have mistakenly treated another’s approval (an external indifferent1) as a true good, thereby subordinating your prohairesis, which is the only real good, to something outside its control.
From a first-principles evolutionary lens, we can now see why this error is so seductive. Our brains were literally built to make it. The neural architecture that kept our ancestors alive is now misfiring in novel environments. The same mechanisms that once helped you avoid exile from a tight-knit tribe now have you refreshing social media feeds at 2 AM, anxiously monitoring whether strangers approve of your opinions.
It’s worth clarifying that Epictetus would not see every act of considering others’ opinions as a failure of character. What matters is whether one’s assent (one’s judgment about what is good) remains governed by reason rather than by fear of disapproval. The evolutionary impulse is not wrong per se; it’s simply pre-rational. The question is whether we let these ancestral algorithms run our lives, or whether we subject them to rational examination.
Think about how this plays out in ordinary life. You’re in a meeting and you disagree with the direction things are heading. You can see the flaws in the plan, but everyone else seems on board. In that moment, your brain is doing exactly what evolution designed it to do, that is, detecting a potential threat to your standing in the group, flooding your system with stress hormones, urging you to conform. From an ancestral perspective, this made sense. Often the group was right, and dissent did carry real costs.
But in the modern context, you may be the only one in the room who sees the flaw. The group may be running on outdated assumptions or engaging in group-think. Your evolutionary machinery doesn’t know the difference between “I might be wrong and should consider the group’s wisdom” and “I should suppress my honest judgment because I fear losing status.” Both situations trigger the same ancient alarm systems.
Or consider something more personal. You’re in a relationship that you know, in your bones, isn’t working. But when you imagine ending it, you immediately think of what your friends will say, what your family will think, how you’ll explain it. Again, your brain is running ancestral software. In a small tribe, the opinions of your extended family and social network carried enormous weight. They might cut you off from support, side with your partner, damage your reputation for future relationships.
But in the modern context, you’re likely economically independent, geographically mobile, and part of a society with millions of potential partners and friend groups. The ancestral calculus no longer applies. Yet the fear remains because natural selection built it into your neural architecture over hundreds of thousands of years. A few thousand years of civilization (a mere eye-blink in evolutionary time) hasn’t rewired these deep systems.
It is crucial to distinguish here between seeking wise counsel and needing external approval. The former is an act of humility and learning, where you bring your own judgment into conversation with trusted perspectives. The latter is an act of surrender, where you silence your inner voice because you fear the social cost of heeding it. Epictetus is warning against the latter. Virtuous character can be informed by others, but it cannot be outsourced to them.
In Stoic terms, reputation and external opinions are indifferents (i.e., they have no intrinsic bearing on virtue or happiness). They may, however, be instrumentally useful in the performance of our social duties (kathekonta). The crucial distinction is in the motivation of the faculty of choice (prohairesis). The wise person may use information about others’ opinions to act more effectively in the world, but their assent, their fundamental judgment of what is good, remains anchored solely in virtue. Seeking counsel is an exercise in wisdom only if its goal is to clarify what is just or rational; if the goal is to secure approval or avoid disapproval, the prohairesis has already been corrupted by valuing an indifferent over virtue.
From an evolutionary standpoint, we can recognize that the impulse to seek approval is a heuristic, a mental shortcut that worked well enough in ancestral environments to be preserved by natural selection. But heuristics can fail catastrophically when the environment changes. The rational faculty (hegemonikon) exists precisely to evaluate when our inherited impulses serve us and when they lead us astray.
“Appear as a philosopher to yourself…”
This is where Epictetus becomes truly challenging, because it requires overriding some of our deepest evolutionary programming.
Consider what evolutionary game theory2 tells us about cooperation and reputation. In repeated interactions, organisms evolve to track who cooperates and who defects, who can be trusted and who cannot. This is how cooperation emerges among non-kin. But this system requires witnesses, others who can observe your behavior and update their models of your character. The entire edifice of human reciprocal altruism, what allowed us to build complex societies, depends on being seen.
Now Epictetus asks us to do something that seems almost absurd from this evolutionary perspective: to be our own witness. To act with virtue even when no one else will ever know. To maintain our character in the dark, where natural selection built no incentives to do so.
Being your own witness is not an act of subjective self-approval or personal “authenticity” in the modern sense. Rather, it means aligning your prohairesis with universal reason (logos) (i.e., the rational principle that governs all things).
The Stoic daimon is your own guiding reason, understood as a fragment of the universal logos dwelling within you. It is not a separate personality but your highest self; to “be witnessed” by it is to live with the constant awareness that your choices are seen by a faculty aligned with cosmic reason. You obstruct its guidance only through your own false judgments.
From an evolutionary perspective, we might understand the daimon as the part of us that can step outside the immediate calculus of survival and reproduction, the part that can ask not “Will this help me survive and reproduce?” but “Is this in accordance with reason? Is this virtuous?” This capacity for self-reflection and self-regulation is itself a product of evolution (specifically, of our greatly expanded prefrontal cortex), but it allows us to transcend the simpler imperatives that seem to govern other animals and even much of our own behavior.
This is harder than it sounds, precisely because we’re fighting deep evolutionary programming. Our brains are prediction machines constantly modeling what others think of us. The default mode network (the brain’s “resting state” that activates when we’re not focused on external tasks) spends much of its time simulating social scenarios, imagining what others think, rehearsing social interactions.3 This is one of the key features that allowed our ancestors to navigate complex social hierarchies.
To be your own witness requires repeatedly redirecting this machinery. Instead of letting your brain run its automatic social simulations, you must consciously redirect your attention to the question: “What does reason demand here? What is virtuous?” This is why the Stoics emphasized constant practice (askēsis); you’re literally retraining neural pathways that evolution spent millions of years optimizing for a different purpose.
For Stoics, self-witnessing means aligning your prohairesis with universal reason, a unified process of guarding your moral character against corruption by false judgments. You have to be honest enough to see yourself clearly, including your flaws and failures and mixed motives. But you also have to trust in reason enough to stand by your own judgment, even when it’s unpopular, even when others don’t understand. This is partly what makes virtuous character so difficult to maintain. From an evolutionary perspective, self-deception is often adaptive. Studies show that people who are slightly over-confident, who can convince themselves of their own narratives, often do better socially than brutally honest self-assessors. If you can genuinely believe your own positive spin, you can present it more convincingly to others. Natural selection favored those who could manage their own self-image for social advantage.
The Stoic demand for rigorous self-honesty runs directly counter to this. It requires you to see yourself clearly even when clarity is painful, even when self-deception would be more comfortable and perhaps even more socially advantageous. This is not what our brains were built to do.
Still, being your own witness doesn’t mean trusting your perception uncritically. Stoics warned against self-deception as one of the mind’s deepest traps. True self-witnessing requires continual examination, testing your impressions, interrogating your motives, and exposing your reasoning to scrutiny so that trust in yourself rests on deep, earned understanding.
Performance
Our culture makes this particularly difficult because it has so many systems designed to exploit our evolved psychology. Social media is the obvious culprit: platforms literally engineered by teams of behavioral scientists to hijack our approval-seeking mechanisms and keep us compulsively checking for validation. But the problem goes deeper than that. From childhood, we’re taught to look to authority figures for approval: parents, teachers, coaches, bosses. This isn’t arbitrary; it reflects a deep evolutionary reality. Human children have the longest developmental period of any animal. We’re born helpless and remain dependent for years, learning complex cultural knowledge from our elders. Natural selection built powerful mechanisms for attending to and seeking approval from caregivers and authority figures because children who did so were more likely to survive and learn what they needed to thrive.
The challenge is that these mechanisms don’t come with an off switch. The same neural circuitry that made you attend carefully to your mother’s approval when you were three is still firing when you’re thirty, making you anxious about your boss’s opinion or your followers’ reactions. Your brain doesn’t clearly distinguish between “authority figure whose approval I need to survive” and “random person on the internet whose opinion is irrelevant to my life.”
Of course, none of this is inherently wrong. We are social beings who learn, cooperate, and grow through feedback and shared standards. The system corrupts prohairesis when it trains us to replace our rational faculty with these external metrics. In other words, the danger isn’t in listening to the chorus, but in letting it become the conductor. From an evolutionary perspective, we can understand this corruption as an exploited mismatch. In ancestral environments, social feedback was relatively reliable and came from people you knew, who knew you, in contexts where reputation tracked reality reasonably well. Now we receive constant feedback from strangers, algorithms, and systems designed to manipulate us, in contexts where reputation can be manufactured, gamed, or destroyed by random chance or mob dynamics.
The evolutionary mechanisms that once helped you calibrate your behavior in a small tribe are now being triggered thousands of times per day by stimuli they were never designed to process. It’s like giving a navigation system built for walking across the savanna to a fighter pilot; the instruments may be sophisticated, but they’re being asked to solve a radically different problem than the one they evolved to solve.
Somewhere along the way, many of us lose the ability to distinguish the useful signal of feedback from the noisy demand for conformity. We forget to check in with ourselves. The result is a kind of chronic inauthenticity that we may not even recognize as such. We curate our social media presence, we massage our resume, we tell people what they want to hear. And each time we do this, we reinforce the habit of looking outward for validation rather than inward for truth. We become strangers to ourselves, undermining our capacity for virtue.
Freedom
What Epictetus offers is a path toward a different kind of freedom. He was not advocating the freedom to do whatever you want, but the freedom that comes from not needing others to validate your existence. When you can be your own witness, you begin to free yourself from the exhausting compulsion to manage others’ perceptions. Such freedom is hard-won precisely because it requires overriding deeply evolved impulses. Consider the neuroscience. Social rejection activates the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, which are the same regions involved in physical pain processing.4 Your brain literally processes social pain as a threat on par with physical injury.
When you choose to speak an unpopular truth, to make a decision others will judge, or to fail publicly, your brain is registering a genuine threat. The amygdala fires, cortisol floods your system, your heart rate increases. From your nervous system’s perspective, you are in danger. The fact that this “danger” is social rather than physical doesn’t matter to neural circuits that evolved long before humans developed complex language and abstract social hierarchies.
Stoic practice, then, is a form of deliberate exposure therapy. By repeatedly choosing virtue over approval, you gradually teach your nervous system that social disapproval, while uncomfortable, is not actually dangerous. You re-calibrate the threat-detection systems.
Modern readers might find that self-sufficiency reduces social anxiety, but the Stoics themselves valued it primarily because it preserves prohairesis from corruption by externals. The resulting consistency of character and action does benefit others. Fulfilling our social nature is a key part of living in accordance with nature. But that benefit is a consequence of virtue, not its motivating goal. Interestingly, evolutionary theory can also help us understand why virtue might benefit others even when that’s not the conscious motivation. If we think of virtue as a form of robust decision-making aligned with reason, it naturally tends to produce behaviors that are pro-social in genuine ways, as opposed to the performative pro-sociality that comes from reputation management. Virtue signals honest quality; reputation-seeking can fake it but often fails under pressure.
This doesn’t mean you become indifferent to others’ opinions or impervious to criticism, just that you have a stable center that doesn’t shift with every change in social weather. You can listen to feedback without being enslaved by it. You can care what people think without needing them to think well of you in order to maintain your moral character.
There’s also something valuable about this stance in how it affects your relationships. When you stop needing constant external validation, you stop putting others in the position of having to constantly validate you. You free them from the burden of shoring up your sense of self-worth, of managing your emotions, of carefully monitoring what they say so they don’t upset you. And you free yourself from the resentment that builds when others inevitably fail to give you the approval you crave. From an evolutionary perspective, this shift actually aligns better with genuine reciprocal altruism. That is, when you’re not desperately seeking approval, you can engage with others more authentically. Your pro-social behaviors are more credible because they’re not obviously strategic. Paradoxically, by ceasing to optimize for others’ approval, you may actually build deeper, more genuine relationships, the kind our social brains were actually designed for.
So what does it actually look like to be your own witness, given the evolutionary forces we’re working against?
First, it means understanding that the impulse to seek approval is not a moral failing, but a biological inheritance. Your anxiety about others’ opinions is a sophisticated adaptation that kept your ancestors alive. So, the work is not to eliminate these impulses (you can’t; they’re hardwired) but to develop the capacity to notice them and choose a different response. This is where the Stoic practice of attention becomes crucial. While the Stoics emphasized constant vigilance over one’s judgments (what Epictetus calls prosochē), their practice focused on guarding the ruling faculty (hēgemonikon) against false assent. By creating a space between the impression (”they disapprove of me”) and your judgment about that impression, you reclaim the power of your rational faculty.
From a neuroscientific perspective, this space corresponds to the gap between automatic limbic responses and prefrontal executive control. The amygdala may fire when you detect social disapproval, but the prefrontal cortex can evaluate whether this threat is real, whether the disapproval is relevant to your actual goals, whether it should influence your judgment of what’s good. This capacity to pause between stimulus and response is perhaps the most distinctively human capability we possess. Other animals seem to respond to threats automatically, but we humans can notice our automatic responses and choose differently, based on reason rather than instinct.
Practically, it means developing practices of self-reflection that are honest but not self-flagellating. It means regularly asking yourself, “Am I living in alignment with what reason demands? Can I look at my actions and feel that they represent virtue? Where have I surrendered my autonomy, and why?” It means noticing when you’re reaching for outside approval and pausing to ask what you actually think, independent of what others might think. This pause is crucial because it interrupts the automatic social-brain processes that evolved to run beneath conscious awareness. You’re bringing unconscious processes into consciousness, where they can be examined rationally. It also means accepting that you’ll sometimes get it wrong. Being your own witness doesn’t mean being infallible, but being accountable to yourself for your mistakes and willing to learn from them without needing others to absolve you first. This, too, runs counter to evolutionary programming. Our brains evolved to manage our reputation, which often means minimizing, justifying, or hiding our mistakes. Owning them honestly, even when no one else knows about them, requires overriding these self-protective impulses.
Most radically, it means accepting that some part of your life will always be visible only to you, that you will have thoughts and struggles and moments of choice that no one else will ever fully see or understand. And that has to be enough. This is perhaps the most counter-evolutionary aspect of Stoic practice. Natural selection built us to care desperately about being seen, being known, being approved of. The idea of acting virtuously in complete obscurity, where it cannot possibly enhance your reputation or fitness, is almost alien to evolved psychology. And yet this is where true virtue lives. The most important acts of your life (e.g., the choices to be patient, honest, or courageous) may never be witnessed by anyone but yourself. If you act virtuously only when you are being watched, you are not living with virtue; you are performing for an audience.
But, your deepest rational nature is fueled by the realization that your actions align with universal reason and the nature of the cosmos, not by the recognition of others.
Epictetus wrote this nearly two thousand years ago, and yet it still sounds fresh, still feels urgent. Maybe that’s because this is one of those eternal human challenges: the temptation to give away our inner authority in exchange for social acceptance. But we can now add an evolutionary perspective. That is, it feels eternal because it is written into our biology. The pull toward approval-seeking isn’t a cultural artifact that changes with the times, but a deep feature of human nature shaped by millions of years of natural selection. Every human society ever studied shows evidence of reputation management, status competition, and sensitivity to social approval. These are human universals because they’re evolutionary universals. All of which makes the Stoic project both harder and more important than the ancient philosophers might have realized. They were asking people to transcend not just cultural conditioning but biological imperatives. They were asking the human animal to become something more than the sum of its evolutionary parts.
For Epictetus, the power to be one’s own witness came not from subjective emotion but from aligning with the rational order of nature, the logos that governs all things. Virtue was less about personal authenticity and more about living in harmony with universal reason. Translating this into modern terms probably means something like grounding self-respect in coherence with truth and virtue, rather than with mere self-expression. Interestingly, evolution itself provides a framework for understanding this grounding. Natural selection is a mindless process, but it produced in us minds capable of understanding it, and transcending it. We are the universe becoming conscious of itself, as Carl Sagan put it. The same evolutionary process that built our approval-seeking mechanisms also built our capacity for reason, for self-reflection, for philosophy. The Stoic invitation is to use the higher capacities evolution gave us to manage the lower ones. To let reason govern instinct. To recognize our evolutionary inheritance without being enslaved by it. Doing so is, of course, living in accordance with nature in the deepest sense (not the nature of the savanna-dwelling primate, but the nature of the rational being we’re capable of becoming).
But it’s also the only path to genuine self-respect and genuine freedom. When you can look yourself in the eye and trust what you see there, you become less manipulable, less anxious, less dependent on the fickle winds of others’ opinions. You become more capable of real courage, real creativity, real love, because you’re no longer performing for an audience. You’re just living, witnessed by the one person whose judgment ultimately matters most: you. That is the liberating truth within Epictetus’s warning. To be your own witness is to activate your essential nature as a rational being. You realize that virtue (the sole good) is not a status bestowed by others but a state of your own prohairesis, cultivated through unceasing practice in aligning your judgments with reason. And, such practice is difficult precisely because it requires overriding millions of years of evolutionary programming. But that difficulty is a feature. It’s what makes virtue virtuous. If it were easy, if it aligned perfectly with our evolved impulses, it wouldn’t require prohairesis at all. We’d be no different from other animals following their instincts. The struggle itself, the conscious effort to align with reason despite the pull of social anxiety, the deliberate choice of truth over approval, the cultivation of virtue in darkness where no one can see, is what makes us fully human. It’s the exercise of the capacities that distinguish us from our evolutionary cousins.
As Marcus Aurelius would later reflect, you thereby prevent the external world from colonizing your “inner citadel” (a metaphor Epictetus anticipates in his focus on guarding one’s faculty of choice). Ultimately, virtue is not performance for external verification, but the stable, unimpeded functioning of a soul living in harmony with the nature of the whole. And perhaps this is the deepest irony: by understanding our evolutionary nature (how we’re built, why we crave approval, what neural mechanisms drive our behavior), we gain the power to transcend that nature. Science reveals the chains; philosophy provides the key. Together, they offer a path to the freedom that Epictetus promised: the freedom of being your own witness, answerable only to reason, living in accordance with the deepest truth of what we are and what we might become.
In Stoic philosophy, "indifferents" (adiaphora) are things that lie outside the domain of virtue and vice (i.e., they are neither inherently good nor bad). These include health, wealth, reputation, pleasure, pain, life, and death. While these things don't affect one's moral character or true happiness (eudaimonia), the Stoics recognized that some indifferents are naturally "preferred" (like health) and others "dispreferred" (like illness). The key is that a virtuous person can be equally happy whether they possess preferred indifferents or not, because happiness depends solely on virtue, that is, on the quality of one's prohairesis (moral choice). This contrasts sharply with our evolved psychology, which treats many indifferents (especially social status and approval) as if they were essential to well-being. The Stoic training is to recognize intellectually and feel emotionally that these things, while sometimes useful for fulfilling our duties, have no bearing on what truly matters.
Evolutionary game theory applies mathematical game theory to biological evolution, analyzing how different behavioral strategies succeed or fail across generations through natural selection. Unlike classical game theory (which assumes rational actors making deliberate choices), evolutionary game theory models how strategies spread in populations simply because organisms using them survive and reproduce more successfully. A key insight is that cooperation can evolve among non-relatives through repeated interactions: if you’ll encounter the same individual multiple times, strategies like “tit-for-tat” (cooperate first, then match what the other player did) can out-compete pure selfishness. This requires reputation tracking (remembering who cooperated and who defected), which is why humans evolved sophisticated social cognition to monitor others’ behavior and our own standing in the group. This framework helps explain why we’re so sensitive to being observed: in ancestral environments, being caught defecting (cheating, lying, failing to reciprocate) could destroy your reputation and thus your evolutionary fitness. The Stoic challenge is to recognize that while these reputation-management mechanisms evolved for good evolutionary reasons, they shouldn’t govern our judgments about what is truly good or virtuous.
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Chester, D. S., DeWall, C. N., & Pond, R. S., Jr (2016). The push of social pain: Does rejection’s sting motivate subsequent social reconnection? Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 16(3), 541–550. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-016-0412-9