Preferred Indifferents: Money, Health, and Fame According to the Stoics
Introduction
One of the most common objections to Stoicism sounds like this: "If for the Stoics money, health, and reputation are neither good nor bad, then it doesn't matter whether you take care of yourself, save money, or do your job well." And yet, the best-known Stoics were the exact opposite of careless people: Seneca managed one of the largest fortunes in Rome, Marcus Aurelius governed an empire, and Musonius Rufus gave detailed advice on food and exercise.
The apparent contradiction is resolved with one of the school's most ingenious and least understood concepts: preferred indifferents. Understanding it changes how you set goals and, above all, how you live when those goals are not met.
You can prefer health and work for it without placing your worth as a person in it.
Good, Bad, and Indifferent
The Stoics divided everything that exists into three groups:
- The good: virtue—that is, wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance—and the actions born from it.
- The bad: vice and the actions born from it.
- The indifferent: everything else. Life and death, health and illness, wealth and poverty, fame and disrepute.
Why "indifferent"? Because, according to the Stoics, none of those things makes a person good or bad. Someone can be rich and a scoundrel, poor and just, healthy and a coward, sick and brave. Furthermore, all those external goods can be used well or poorly: money can fund a hospital or a scam. What decides whether the use is good is the virtue of the person using it.
The Second Division: Preferred and Dispreferred
Up to this point, the theory seems to lead to passivity. But the Stoics added a second distinction within the indifferents:
- Preferred indifferents (proegmena): health, life, moderate wealth, a good reputation, friends, beauty, physical strength.
- Dispreferred indifferents (apoproegmena): illness, pain, poverty, disrepute, loneliness.
Preferred indifferents have what the Stoics called "selective value": it is reasonable to choose them when possible, because they accord with human nature. A sensible person prefers to be healthy rather than sick, and nothing in Stoicism says otherwise. What Stoicism says is that your worth as a person does not depend on achieving it.
Cicero, in On Ends, recounts that Zeno explained the term using an image from the royal court: "preferred" things are like high-ranking officials who stand close to the king. They have rank and it is reasonable to give them their place, but they are not the king. The king, in this image, is virtue.
Seneca and His Fortune
The most famous—and most debated—case is that of Seneca. His critics at the time accused him of hypocrisy: he preached simplicity while accumulating enormous wealth. In On the Happy Life, he responds with a sentence that sums up the doctrine of indifferents: the wise person does not love riches, but prefers them; he does not admit them into his soul, only into his house.
Seneca adds that the difference shows when the money is lost. For the fool, losing a fortune is devastating, because his identity was placed in it. For the wise person, it takes away comforts, but does not reduce him to nothing, because his worth lay elsewhere. One can debate whether Seneca lived up to that idea (he himself admitted he was not a sage, just someone trying to improve), but the idea itself remains useful.
How This Changes Goal-Setting
The doctrine of preferred indifferents does not eliminate goals; it changes their place in life.
You can aim for health. Working out, sleeping well, and eating sensibly are reasonable choices. But if an injury or illness arrives, that does not make you a worse person or cancel out what you did well.
You can aim for money. Saving and investing prudently is choosing a preferred indifferent. But your worth does not rise with your account balance or drop during a crisis.
You can aim for recognition. Doing good work and taking care of your reputation is reasonable. But what others think of you is not under your control, and if one day you are unfairly criticized, your character remains intact.
In practice, this usually produces two effects: less anxiety while pursuing the goal and less devastation if the goal is not reached. Paradoxically, someone who does not stake their entire identity on the outcome usually works more calmly and, therefore, with greater clarity.
The Question That Orders Priorities
When two preferred indifferents conflict, or when a preferred indifferent clashes with virtue, the Stoic has a clear criterion: virtue comes first. Some examples:
- A promotion that requires lying about a project's numbers: the promotion is a preferred indifferent; honesty is a good. The promotion is turned down.
- A highly profitable business opportunity that harms third parties: wealth is a preferred indifferent; justice is a good.
- An extreme diet that promises quick results at the expense of health: here two preferred indifferents clash (appearance and health), and temperance helps choose the more reasonable one.
Common Mistakes
- Using "it's indifferent" as an excuse for neglect. Preferred indifferents are actively chosen. Neglecting your health or finances out of "Stoicism" is getting it backward.
- Looking down on people with material success. Wealth is neither good nor bad; what matters is how it was obtained and how it is used.
- Believing you have to suffer to be virtuous. Poverty and illness are dispreferred: they are not sought out, they are endured when they arrive.
- Applying it coldly to others. Telling someone who lost their job that "it's an indifferent" is cruelty, not philosophy.
Conclusion
Preferred indifferents allow you to take practical life seriously without being at its mercy. You can want to be healthy, have money, and be respected, and work toward all of that, knowing that what is essential lies in how you act along the way. Do this exercise today: write down your three most important goals for the year and, next to each one, write which part is a preferred indifferent (the outcome) and which virtue is trained by pursuing it (consistency, honesty, prudence). If the goal is not met, the second column is still yours.
References
- Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.101-107.
- Cicero. On Ends, III.50-54.
- Seneca. On the Happy Life, 21-23.
- Epictetus. Discourses, II.5.
- Sellars, J. (2019). Lessons in Stoicism. Allen Lane.
- Vázquez, M. (2019). Invicto: Logra más. Sufre menos. Fitness Revolucionario.