The Stoic emperor isn't merely counseling detachment here—he's identifying a peculiar trap of the mind: we often manufacture suffering by imagining how others perceive us, then treat those imagined judgments as real obstacles. The distinction matters because we tend to think our problems come from *actual* criticism when they largely stem from the exhausting surveillance we conduct of ourselves *through others' eyes*. When you stop scrolling through colleagues' social media updates or replaying a conversation for hidden slights, you recover not just peace, but the mental bandwidth to pursue what actually matters to you. Marcus understood something modern life makes achingly clear: the neighbor's opinion occupies no real estate in your life except what you lease to it.