Understand
If virtue is the only true good, what are you supposed to make of ordinary things like health, money, a good reputation, or a stable job? The Stoics called these “indifferents” (adiaphora), meaning they don’t themselves make a life good or bad. But they split indifferents further into two groups: “preferred” (health, wealth, a good name, and similar things, worth choosing over their opposites when nothing more important is at stake) and “dispreferred” (sickness, poverty, a bad reputation). The category solves a real problem: it lets a Stoic want ordinary good things without contradicting the claim that virtue alone is the good.
Examine
Why “indifferent” doesn’t mean “you shouldn’t care”
In everyday English, “indifferent” means “not caring.” The Stoic technical term doesn’t mean that. It means these things don’t affect whether your life, in the sense of your character and judgment, is going well. You’re still permitted, even expected, to have a rational preference for health over sickness or for having enough money over having none. The classical sources describe this preference as selection (a reasoned choice among things that don’t carry moral weight), not indifference in the ordinary sense of apathy.
The clearest ancient sources for this doctrine are secondary and later: Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book 7, summarizes the early Stoic classification of goods, evils, and indifferents, and the Roman philosopher Cicero, writing as a sympathetic outside observer rather than a Stoic himself, sets out the Stoic position on indifferents at length in De Finibus, Book 3. Both are reporting on Zeno’s and Chrysippus‘s doctrine rather than quoting it directly, since almost none of the early Stoics’ own writing on this survives.
The test the Stoics used
The dividing line isn’t “things that matter” versus “things that don’t.” It’s whether something can be used well or badly. Money can fund something generous or something corrupt; the money itself doesn’t determine which. Virtue, by contrast, is the one thing that’s good regardless of how it’s used, because using it well is what “virtue” means. That asymmetry, not the value of the thing itself, is why virtue gets a different status than everything else, including things that are genuinely worth having.
How this connects to the dichotomy of control
Preferred indifferents mostly fall on the “not up to us” side of the Dichotomy of Control: you can pursue health and financial security, but you can’t fully guarantee either. The category of preferred indifferents is what lets a Stoic pursue things outside their control (a job, a relationship, a clean bill of health) without making their sense of a well-lived life depend on securing them. You act to get the preferred outcome; you don’t stake your character on getting it.
A modern example
Two candidates apply for the same job. One gets it. In Stoic terms, getting the job was a reasonable thing to want and pursue, it’s a preferred indifferent, worth preparing well for. But the candidate who didn’t get it hasn’t lost anything that was ever classified as “the good” in the first place. Their character, their honesty in the interview, their integrity in how they handled a rejected offer, remains exactly as intact as it was before, because none of that depended on the outcome.
Common misunderstanding: calling wealth, health, or reputation “indifferent” is not a claim that they don’t matter or shouldn’t be pursued. It’s a claim about what kind of good they are: worth a reasonable preference, but not the measure of whether your life is going well. Ancient Stoics, including wealthy ones like Seneca, are recorded pursuing and enjoying preferred indifferents without treating this as inconsistent with their philosophy.
Practice
- When pursuing something (a job, money, a relationship, good health), name it honestly as a preferred indifferent: reasonable to want, not the measure of your character.
- Pursue it with real effort, wanting a preferred outcome is not a Stoic failure.
- Before the outcome is known, decide in advance that your evaluation of yourself won’t depend on which way it goes.
- After the outcome, check whether your character, honesty, effort, judgment, held up regardless of the result.
Primary sources
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book 7
- Cicero, De Finibus, Book 3 (a sympathetic outside account of Stoic ethics, not a Stoic author himself)