Events and opinions in contemporary culture

One of the fundamental Stoic concepts is that people react not to the events, but to their judgments about them (Epictetus, e.g.). This is a very powerful but simple idea which is easy to understand, but not so easy to put into practice. It takes a lot of work to train ourselves to pay attention to our judgments, and to realize that they are not the events themselves, but our interpretation of them. And it takes even more work to train ourselves to change our judgments, and to realize that we have the power to do so. In contemporary culture, a whole new layer of mass media and social media is injected between events and our judgments, offering us their interpretation of events before we have time to form our own opinion, raising the difficulty of self-training to another level. But the Stoics would say that this is just another opportunity to practice philosophy, and to train ourselves to be free.