You are not wise.
What you are is someone in progress.
Philosophers, across all schools of thought, often grapple with a paradoxical notion: the truly wise person does not exist. Wisdom is an —a shining star we strive toward but never fully reach. Why? Because humanity, by its nature, is imperfect. True wisdom eludes us.
You are in the realm of stoicism what we call a Progressor (Prokoptôn)
But there is beauty in this pursuit.
The one in progress dedicates each day to striving for wisdom, evolving through right actions, enlightened judgment, and controlled desires. He is no longer merely a layman, no longer consumed by the vain distractions that preoccupy the people around you. A light now illuminates his path, and that light is the pursuit of wisdom.
Yet even as he walks that path, he knows he will never fully arrive. And that is your lot as well, {{username}}. This truth is noble, and it demands humility.
The human soul is difficult to tame.
Emotional reactions arise instinctively,
unbidden,
and man cannot always command his mind.
But herein lies the strength of the one in progress: knowing his weaknesses, he works to overcome them.
He strives,
stumbles, and strives again.
Even Marcus Aurelius, whose writings inspire millions to this day, was not a sage. He was someone in progress. His Meditations testify to this. Page after page, they reveal a man wrestling with his humanity—full of melancholy, discipline, and repeated reminders of the principles he sought to live by. They are the diary of a man seeking the light, not one who has already found it.
He writes:
“Don't be disgusted, don't give up, don't be impatient if you do not carry out entirely conduct based in every detail upon right principles; but after a fall return again, and rejoice if most of your actions are worthier of human character. Love that to which you go back, and don't return to Philosophy as to a schoolmaster, but as a man with sore eyes to the sponge and salve, as another to a poultice, another to a fomentation.” 1
To see yourself as in progress is noble. It is an extraordinary sign of humility—perhaps the greatest of all human virtues, if you ask me, {{username}}.
And remember this passage from Epictetus:
“And if talk about some philosophic principle arises among laymen, keep silence for the most part, for there is great danger that you will spew up immediately what you have not digested. So when a man tells you that you know nothing, and you, like Socrates, are not hurt, then rest assured that you are making a beginning with the business you have undertaken. For sheep, too, do not bring their fodder to the shepherds and show how much they have eaten, but they digest their food within them, and on the outside produce wool and milk. And so do you, therefore, make no display to the laymen of your philosophical principles, but let them see the results which come from these principles when digested.” 2
But this humility must be pure.
Let it be free of vanity,
of false modesty.
Let it guide you with sincerity.