We've all seen it before. Some schleprock reads a few pages of Marcus Aurelius and suddenly he’s giving away his bed, sleeping on a wood plank, eating nothing but uncooked lentils, and calling it clarity. He's proud of himself for being different. The sentiment may be real, but the problem is when the performance outweighs the principle. When its more performative, a carefully staged segment of life played out before social media, that’s not Stoicism, that’s virtue signaling.
The idea of fake it till you make it is ever so appealing because it matches the tempo of modern life: immediate, performative, and results-obsessed. It also echoes a deeper anxiety that if you're not projecting progress, you're invisible. Visibility is a poor measure of growth, however. Rather than making it (whatever it may be) more likely, you just get practiced at faking it, gaining fluency in signals instead of substance.
Why are you so soft in the middle when your lentils are so hard? I've been trying to tell you this whole time, there is not shortcut to building character. It's shaped by repetition. It’s about moving the needle every day. Studying, learning — training the mind and body to perfection. You don’t need the plank bed or raw lentils. Just turn around and keep walking.