Resolve To Think Better

Implicit throughout Stoic texts is the encouragement of accountability for everything that happens to us by way of owning our thoughts about them. Put another way, what we control in our experiences is how we experience them. Understood in its fullness, our capacity for thinking is the superpower that arms us to adopt the useful perspective in all things.

The degree to which we’re able to extract the constructive from the destructive can be the difference between a life of reward or resent. Purposeful thinking allows us to decide what we make of any given moment.

English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds is credited with saying that “there is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” The phrasing carries impact, revealing a defining quality of critical thinking that has us slow to engage it: its perceived laboriousness. It’s not so much the function of thinking we’re averse to, but the function of challenging it, of choosing to assess its merit further.

Many of our judgements are passively formed. From our upbringing and any mentalities instilled, to the media consumed, it could be argued that by a certain point, much of our thinking has been done for us, and thus, we often have to feel sufficiently compelled to adjust it on our own.

Let 2024 be a year in which you consciously engage your capacity for active thinking—for refined thinking. May we think better to live better.

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