People around you do not know

You must be tolerant.

Be tolerant of those who have no idea.
But without vanity, without arrogance.

~

This very writing of mine could be presumptuous, but it's not.

~

What do they not know?
What you now know when you read about stoicism:
what is right
and what is wrong.
It's right to act according to the four cardinal virtues (temperance, courage, justice, prudence), it's right not to place too much emphasis on results, it's right not to be troubled by things we shouldn't care about, whether we prefer them (success, health, prosperity, society) or not (failure, illness, poverty, loneliness).

And it's good not to expect too much from others,
because others don't know. In the Socratic tradition, which was continued by the Stoics, virtue is a "science" that must be taught and learned with the soul. It's a knowledge that must be acquired.

And yet
people don't know.

Marcus Aurelius admonishes himself to reflect right at the beginning of his Meditations:

“Say to yourself in the early morning:
I shall meet to-day inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men.
All these things have come upon them
through ignorance of real good and ill [and…] nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another therefore is to oppose Nature, and to be vexed with another or to turn away from him is to tend to antagonism.” ¹

This text by Marcus Aurelius, which is at the very beginning of his Meditations, is reminiscent of the emperor's teacher, Epictetus:

[the wise] to one who is unlike he will be tolerant, gentle, kindly, forgiving, as to one who is ignorant or is making a mistake in things of the greatest importance; he will not be harsh with anybody, because he knows well the saying of Plato, that "every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth." ²

What is this truth? The truth of the philosophy you're studying.

So the people around you're ignorant,
but you don't despise them, because deep down they have good intentions. If they do evil, it's only because they're deceived by the appearance of good, but they don't seek evil for the sake of evil ³.

So you owe it to yourself to be lenient with them and to move on when you feel like it, i.e. to share your knowledge, your view of things and your philosophy with them. Marcus Aurelius ⁴ urges us to do this.

But this is a tricky action that can be interpreted as arrogance by the other party. If you do it, turn to that other party "not reproachfully nor as though I were displaying forbearance, but genuinely and generously" ⁵. In this concluding part of the program, I invite you to be humble with your learning, and it's always hard to be humble when others perceive you as a teacher...