There’s a certain person in my life who, upon hearing any news of me in the wider world, to my ears responds with backhanded compliments. Perhaps I’m wrong in this assessment. But it seems that her response to me sharing anything positive in my life is to chide me indirectly for not being more generally cheerful about everything.

She’ll say things like, remember this moment when you have bad days. The feeling I take away from it is that she believes I’m a constant complainer and the piece of good news should serve to shut me up and prevent me from griping so much.

But I don’t feel like I do gripe about life all that often. I don’t have particularly high expectations either — I’m very much content with the life I have. I no longer have any desire for promotions and life-changing raises, I can get by with what I have and would rather not have the kind of work responsibilities that exceed my known abilities.

Even so, I don’t believe that I should passively take everything that affects me either. I do speak my mind when something strikes me as wrong, but it’s often more so to protect people around me than to allay my own pain and discomfort.

Then again, one could argue that this essay is a complaint about something I’m intuiting, and therefore might be a cry from my unconscious more than it is a lament about a person who is irritating me with her subtle critiques.

These thoughts are front of mind for me as I approach Montaigne’s essay about glory. He has this to say on the subject:

We care more that people should speak of us than how they speak of us; and it is enough for us that our name should be current in men’s mouths, no matter in what way it may be current. It seems that to be known is to have one’s life and duration somehow in the keeping of others. As for me, I hold that I exist only in myself; and as for that other life of mine that lies in the knowledge of my friends, Considering it naked and simply in itself, I know very well that I feel no fruit or enjoyment from it except by the vanity of a fanciful opinion.

And when I am dead, I shall feel it even less; and moreover I shall lose completely the use of the real benefits which sometimes accidentally come after it. I shall no longer have any grip by which to seize reputation, nor by which it can touch me or reach me.

But I don’t feel that way at all — I care far more about how people speak about me than whether they are speaking at all. I am, for the most part, content with being in the background and not taking up huge space in life. My achievements are important only to me, and if others find them pointless, I don’t care.

It is when people voice opinions that I am bothered. Nothing annoys me more than feeling misunderstood, it is probably why I put so much effort into detailing myself as much as I can in this forum. But perhaps Montaigne is right in this regard, that I only exist in myself and should stop caring what others think of me entirely.

Still, I find it impossible to believe that Montaigne was writing honestly about that. Why go on in his essays if he didn’t care about the opinions of others? As he writes, even those who decry fame care a great deal whether their name appears on the books proclaiming it.

It’s a subject more complicated than Montaigne asserts — and likely defies my understanding as well. We always run into the problem of other minds. Our opinion of others is often a projected belief about us. And our interior states, the ones that can be expressed, mask the internal drives we are trying to hide away.

Perhaps I have a stronger desire for fame and acclaim that I’d like to admit. If that’s the case, I should be far more discontent than I am and more eager to have an immediate impact on my life’s course. But is that, in the long run, good for me or anyone else?

It’s entirely possible that I am suppressing unconscious desires in my life, but that suppression is what’s right for me and everyone else.