04.10.2026 Diary XXXIV Oikeiosis: the nearest ring, the most neglected

04.10.2026 Diary Page XXXIV

Looking after yourself is not the rival of looking after someone else. It is where it is learned.

Sunday. Ankara has turned cold, the window glass fogs up in the mornings.

Today I stayed home and did not do a single task until noon. In the hours when I was not doing anything, the sentence running in the background was this: you cannot sit this idle.

Whose sentence it is is not clear. I have had it for years, I do not know where it came from. The only thing I know is that the same sentence is never built for anyone else. If someone is sitting because they are tired, I understand and I do not get angry. If I sit, the sentence comes.

The word that comes from home

The Stoics have a concept, and at its root stands the home.

Oikos means home. The word economy comes from there, and ecology too. Oikeiosis means making something your own, counting it as belonging to you.

The Stoics set this up as the first movement of a living creature. Every creature that is born first counts its own existence as its own; it protects its own body, it drives away what harms it. This is not a choice, it is nature's first step.

Then the ring widens. First oneself, then one's close ones, then the place one lives, then all people. Hierocles drew this idea as concentric circles: you stand at the very center, and the circles open outward.

The Stoics' moral proposal was to draw the outer circles inward. To see the person far away as the one close by.

The problem with my circles

When I first read this scheme I looked at my own rings and saw something strange.

The outer circles are in place. Work, the world around me, being the person who is consulted, listening to someone's trouble. All of them work, and work well.

What is missing is the innermost circle.

This is a fault the Stoics did not take into account. They assume the innermost one is set up by itself. Their assumption is reasonable: no living creature is born in a way that harms itself.

But if a person grows up where looking after yourself is counted as selfishness, that first ring can be left unbuilt. From the outside it looks like sacrifice. From the inside it is a lack.

In the why self-care is hard article I described the side of this that has to do with executive functions: drinking water, eating, sleeping, all of them need starting, and starting is expensive. What I want to add today is that alongside the cost there is also a matter of permission.

Starting is hard, true. But on some days I manage to start work and I do not manage to look after myself. If the cost is the same for both, where does the difference come from?

The difference comes from permission. I am sure the work needs to be done. I cannot be sure that looking after myself needs to be done.

The Stoics' answer

What the Stoa says on this is harsh and it is useful to me.

According to them standing by yourself is not selfishness, because selfishness means putting yourself in someone else's place. Oikeiosis is putting yourself in your own place. The two are not the same movement.

Moreover, the outer circles derive from the inner circle. Someone who does not know how to count their own existence as their own does not know what to base another's existence on either.

For a long time I found this sentence too neat. I look at too-neat things with suspicion, because usually something is missing in them.

I think I found what is missing. The scheme is right but its order is not compulsory. Someone can carry the outer circles for years without building the inner circle. And they do carry. Only the carrying costs more and the cost is paid late.

I wrote about when that cost gets paid in the burnout article.

The home itself

The word having a home at its root made me think of something else today.

On the day I wrote Home, sweet home, I described the link between the order of the house and the order of my head. Today I see the opposite direction of the same link.

A home is the first place you make your own. Counting a space as your own begins with tidying it. Because tidying is tiring it can be postponed, and when it is postponed the home stops being a place you live in and turns into a job that has to be dealt with.

At that point the home steps outside the innermost circle. A person sits in their own house like a guest.

This was the only thing I did today. I tidied the kitchen, I sat down, I drank coffee, and while drinking the coffee I did nothing else.

I left the phone in another room. It lasted fifteen minutes.

The accounting of fifteen minutes

Those fifteen minutes have nothing to do with productivity and I want to write that, because I can only get myself to approve of rest if it is going to be useful.

The sentence "rest so that you can work better" puts rest back inside the work. The circle does not widen, the work swallows all the circles.

This is not what the Stoics say. The innermost ring is not valuable because it serves the ones outside. It is valuable because it is itself.

I cannot say I fully felt this today. But I was able to build the sentence, and the sentences I build I begin to feel with time. This is the order it works in me: first I write, then it happens.

Narrowing the circles

Hierocles' circle scheme has a continuation, and until today I had always read it from the outside.

His proposal was this: draw the far circles inward. See the stranger as a neighbor, the neighbor as a brother. Moral progress is the closing of distance.

Today I read it from the opposite direction and something else came out.

If circles can be drawn toward each other, the movement does not have to be one-way. The innermost circle can also move away from itself. A person can look at themselves from the distance at which they look at a stranger outside.

I can describe what that is like. Seeing your own tiredness as a complaint instead of as data. Counting your own hunger as information that can be postponed. Saying "let me not exaggerate" about your own illness.

What happens in all three is the same: the person looks at themselves from outside themselves, and the eye that looks from outside is always more merciless.

This fault the Stoics were not interested in is, to my mind, something learned. If a child, when they voice their need, hears in return that they are a burden, they learn not to count the need rather than not to voice it. The difference matters: the first is keeping quiet, the second is not seeing.

Epictetus' famous distinction is useful here. Separate what is in your hands from what is not, he says. Do not grieve over what is not in your hands, stand by what is.

My own body, my own sleep, my own limit are on the list of what is in my hands. Someone else's judgment of me is not.

For years I held the list upside down. I chased the judgment that was not in my hands, I sacrificed the sleep that was. No philosophy text told me this; I had to burn out first to see that I was holding it upside down.

Looking after yourself and pampering yourself

There is something that makes me uncomfortable while writing about this concept, and if I do not write it the text stays incomplete.

The sentence "take good care of yourself" is today the slogan of an industry. Candles, a bath, buying something expensive. It has nothing to do with what the Stoics call oikeiosis.

The difference is here. Bought good care is built as a reward: you worked hard, you deserved it. So it is again defined through work, and it is void on days when you do not deserve it.

Oikeiosis is not a reward. The matter of deserving never comes up. A living creature looks after itself because it counts its own existence as its own; not because of its performance.

The practical test of this is simple. Is it valid on a bad day too?

Eating is valid on a bad day too. Sleeping is valid. Taking the medication is valid. These are what is inside the first ring, and the ring does not shrink depending on that day's productivity.

The mistake I made for years was this. On unproductive days I stopped looking after myself. As if care were something earned, and that day I had not earned it.

Yet the day when it is needed most is exactly that day. The spiral I described in the burnout article starts here: a bad day, care cut off, a worse day the next day.

The only thing that showed me today that this spiral can be turned around was the coffee in my hand, and I had not deserved it. That is the whole point.

What I listened to today

Arvo Pärt — My Heart's in the Highlands.

Written on a poem by Robert Burns. The organ turns in a fixed pattern, the voice moves above it alone. The poem is about the heart of someone far from their homeland staying back there.

The reason I found it fitting for today is this: the piece builds belonging to a place not as a matter of location but as a matter of where the heart stands. The man is not there; his heart is there.

For a while it had been the reverse for me. I was here, my heart was elsewhere, usually next to a job left undone.

Today for fifteen minutes we were in the same place.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Monday and the week is being set up. I will add only one thing to the list for this week.

Once a day, fifteen minutes, something that is not in exchange for anything. I will not write at which hour it will happen, because if I write it, it turns into work.