The Voices We Listen To

Happy Sunday Friends!

Here’s one quote I’m musing on this week, two ideas, three favorites, and one question to take with you into the week ahead.

One Quote I’m Musing

“We all love ourselves more than other people yet care more about their opinion than our own.”
| Marcus Aurelius

Welcome to the holiday season! Each year, I’ve noticed the same ritual shows up.

We start giving performance reviews of our life.

“How do you feel the year went?”
“I could have done more.”
“I should be further along.”
“I do not want to disappoint my family, my team, my mentor, the people watching online.”

Lately, those conversations have less pride, more pressure. Less “look what I built,” more “I hope this is enough to get by.”

The common thread: almost none of the expectations we mention are actually our own.

We say we want a good year. What we often mean is “a year the invisible committee in my head would approve of.”

A Conversation With a Ghost

I was at my last industry engagement, the kind held in a hotel where every ballroom looks exactly the same.

Between sessions I stepped out into the hallway. The carpet had that familiar abstract pattern in brown and blue, like someone dropped a handful of shapes and just left them there. The air smelled like a mix of burnt coffee, overworked air conditioning, and too much eau de toilette.

That is where I met him. We will call him James.

James had his badge on a lanyard, twisting it while we chatted. His cup of coffee had gone from hot to lukewarm to “I should really stop drinking this,” but he kept sipping anyway. That alone told me he was tired.

He is talented. Smart. Mid thirties. Good role. Good money. Doing well.

He did not feel that way.

At some point he exhaled and said:

“I feel like I am being driven by the ghost of my grandfather. He worked hard his entire life, sacrificed for the family, and I feel like he is always looking over my shoulder telling me to do more.”

I started asking questions.

“Tell me about him. What did your grandfather do?”

He told me his grandfather grew up like mine, like many of that generation.

Born at the tail end of the Great Depression.
Many kids in a small house.
Hand me down clothes.
Work by thirteen.

Scarcity forced him to be resourceful, hungry, driven. By the time he was twenty, he had already worked three different jobs. Farmhand at dawn. Warehouse in the afternoon. Fixing neighbors’ fences and engines on the weekends.

Twelve hour shifts. Six days a week. No PTO. No “finding your passion.” Just survival.

Over time he became good at almost everything with his hands. The sort of man who could repair a truck, patch a roof, wire a light, and stretch a dollar until it begged for mercy. James said his grandfather’s palms were so calloused he could take a hot pan out of the oven for a second without flinching.

He created success and stability out of nothing but grit, long days, and the stoic decision to keep going.

No safety net. No venture capital. No personal brand. Just survival, then stability, then a little bit of breathing room.

I asked him, “What did a good year look like for your grandfather?”

He did not answer right away. He looked down at his badge, thumb running the edge like he was reading it in Braille.

“Honestly? No layoffs. Everyone fed. Bills paid. Kids growing. No disasters.”

“Now look at your life,” I said. “Your world is software releases, quarterly reviews, and travel points. Would he even recognize this?”

He shook his head.

“Probably not.”

“So if he were standing here right now, in this ugly carpeted hallway and movable walls, looking at what you have built, what would he actually say? Not the voice in your head. Him. In his own words.”

He paused. You could hear the hum of the air vents and the muffled microphone from the room next door.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Maybe he would tell me to be grateful. Maybe he would tell me to stop worrying about what other people think.”

“So where is the ‘you are not doing enough’ coming from?” I asked.

He went quiet again. The coffee machine hissed behind us like it was answering for him.

That is when it became a joint session.

His grandfather is dead.

My grandfather is dead.

Your grandparents, mentors, teachers, even that one manager I keep arguing with in my head. Many of them are no longer in the room. Some are no longer in this world.

So who is actually talking to us when that voice says:

“You should be further along.”
“You owe us more.”
“You cannot slow down now.”
“You are wasting your life.”

Those voices are not theirs.

They are yours, wearing their face.

And that leads to the simple, hard line:

The voices we listen to must be our own.

I saw it in him, I saw it in me.

I have done a lot of things in my life because of imagined boards of directors in my head.

The platoon sergeant who would have thought I went soft.
The commander I did not want to disappoint.
The anonymous “they” who are “watching” what I do in and out of the Army.
The people scrolling past my LinkedIn profile.
The people skimming my Substack.
The younger version of me who demanded that I never slow down.

None of these people are actually there when I sit at my desk at 10:37 p.m., cursor blinking on an empty document, kids asleep in the next room. The only sound is the high whirr of my laptop fans and the occasional vibration of a notification on my phone. Half the time I’m not even writing; I’m negotiating with people who are not in the room anymore.

Yet the room feels crowded.

Old leaders. Old critics. Old expectations. An invisible promotion board that never adjourns.

You probably have your own ghosts:

• The parent whose approval you never quite got.

• The grandparent who survived real hardship, so your problems feel “trivial.”

• The teacher who called you “wasted potential.”

• The culture that handed you a checklist of what “success” is supposed to look like.

The holidays pour gasoline on all of this.

Office parties, family dinners, social media feeds. It all becomes one big scoreboard. We don’t just compare our year to our own expectations. We compare it to everyone else’s highlight reels and to standards we never consciously chose.

We are not just buying gifts for people.
We are buying the illusion that we are measuring up.

From a Stoic standpoint, this is the core mistake. The events are not the problem. The story you tell yourself about the events is the problem.

I realized in that hallway with James:

The voice in my head is not my grandfather.
The voice in my head is me, choosing to speak in his name.
The voices we listen to must be our own.

Which means something simple and uncomfortable.

If the voice is yours, you are not being chased by expectations.
You are carrying your interpretation, masked as expectation.

That does not mean your grandfather or parents or mentors did not shape you. They did. We would not be who we are without them.

But we cross a line when we use their memory as a weapon against ourselves.

“I cannot rest because Grandpa would not approve.”
“I cannot change careers because my parents invested so much in this one.”
“I cannot slow down because my old unit would think I quit.”

That is not loyalty. That is fear dressed up as duty.

As long as you let those ghosts sit on the internal throne, you are not leading your life. You are managing an imaginary court.

At some point, honoring the people who came before you means stepping off their script and living the life that is actually yours.

Reframe

Though achieving wisdom may only come when we learn to speak with the dead, the dead are not judging you.

They have finished their race.

The only voice you have to live with every day is your own.

So the real question for this season is not:

“Did I live up to what they expected of me this year?”

It is:

“If this voice in my head is mine, what do I want it to say next year?”

That is the work. To choose your own narrator on purpose.

Two Ideas From Me

1. You don’t owe your life to a ghost. You owe it to the living people right in front of you and to the person you are becoming.

2. Expectations are not instructions. You are allowed to hear the old script and still choose a new line.

Top 3 Things This Week

Something to help you think, reflect, and act in your own voice.

1. Book chapter to revisit: “The Story You Tell Yourself” from The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday
   A tight reminder that the narrative in your head about events matters more than the events themselves. A good companion as you catch which voice is narrating your year.

2. A simple year in review exercise
   One page, three headings:
   “Things I am proud of,”
   “Things that hurt,”
   “Things I want more of next year.”
   No polishing. No editing. This is not content. It is a snapshot of your actual life as you see it today. Your voice, not the committee’s.

3. A quiet walk without your phone, à la Nietzsche
   Fifteen to thirty minutes. No headphones, no podcast, no agenda. Just you and your thoughts. Notice which voice shows up first. Is it critical, frantic, measuring you against others, or calm and clear about what matters next?

None of these are fancy. They are just three practical ways to turn down the volume on everyone else and turn up your own signal.

✍️ One Question to Take Into Your Week

“Whose voice am I performing for right now?”

If it is not yours, ask:

“What would my voice say instead?”

If you journal, write both answers down. The contrast will tell you a lot.

Until Sunday, my friends.

Think Dangerously.
–e