There’s a genre of viral video I can’t stop watching: someone at a protest holding a sign, chanting slogans, visibly fired up about their cause. A journalist or content creator approaches with a simple question: “What are you protesting?” or “Why do you believe that?”
And within seconds, it all falls apart.
Not because the questions are gotchas or trick questions—they’re genuinely basic. “Can you explain what that policy actually does?” “What would you propose instead?” “Where did you hear that?” But the person can’t answer. They stammer, deflect, get defensive, or just repeat the slogan louder. One layer of “why?” and the whole structure collapses.
This happens at rallies across the political spectrum. Left, right, doesn’t matter—the pattern is identical. People holding strong opinions they can’t defend because they didn’t arrive at those opinions through reasoning. They absorbed them. Someone told them to be angry about X, so they showed up, made a sign, started chanting. What they think are their convictions are really just talking points they’ve absorbed and are now performing as their own.
This is what a mind that can be fucked with looks like: a collection of downloaded opinions with no foundation underneath. No first principles. No examination. Just borrowed certainty that evaporates under the gentlest scrutiny.
The Inner Citadel
The Stoics had a concept they called the “inner citadel”—your mind as a fortress that external chaos can’t breach. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” The idea wasn’t about being emotionless or detached, but about having sovereignty over what enters your mental space and what you allow to affect you.
Think about those protesters again. Their inner citadels have no walls. Every talking point, every piece of outrage bait, every viral narrative just walks right in and sets up shop. They’re not guarding the gates because they don’t realize there are gates to guard. Someone on their feed or in their media ecosystem told them what to think, and they just... started thinking it. No interrogation. No testing it against their own values or experience. Just immediate absorption and regurgitation.
Epictetus, another Stoic, distinguished between what’s “up to us” and what isn’t. Your thoughts, your judgments, your responses—those are up to you. Other people’s opinions, the news cycle, what’s trending, whether people agree with you—none of that is up to you. A mind that can’t be fucked with understands this distinction viscerally. It doesn’t waste energy trying to control the uncontrollable, and it fiercely protects what actually is within its control: the ability to think independently.
The problem is that most people have inverted this. They’ve outsourced their thinking (the thing they can control) to external forces (things they can’t control), and then they’re confused about why they feel anxious, reactionary, and unmoored. They’re letting the algorithm, the news cycle, their friend group, whoever’s loudest—they’re letting all of that determine what’s happening inside their own heads.
First-Hand vs. Second-Hand
Ayn Rand called this “second-hand thinking,” and it’s all over The Fountainhead. The protagonist, Howard Roark, is an architect who refuses to compromise his vision for approval or money or convention. Everyone around him thinks he’s insane because he won’t just do what’s popular, what sells, what other people want. But Roark operates from first-hand thinking—he knows what he values and why, and he builds from that foundation. He’s literally immune to being fucked with because other people’s opinions have no purchase on him.
Contrast that with Peter Keating, the other architect in the book, who spends his entire life optimizing for what other people think. He becomes successful by every external metric—money, prestige, recognition—but he’s hollow. He has no self underneath the performance because he never developed one. He’s been running other people’s scripts his whole life. When someone asks him what he wants, he can’t answer. He doesn’t know. He’s never asked himself.
This is the split. First-hand thinkers build from their own foundation—their own values, their own reasoning, their own examination of what’s true. Second-hand thinkers borrow everything—opinions, values, certainties—from external sources and then mistake that for having a self.
Watch those protest videos again with this lens. The people who collapse under questioning are second-hand thinkers. They’re Peter Keating holding a sign. They’ve absorbed a narrative, adopted it as their own, and now they’re performing it—but there’s nothing underneath. No foundation. No reasoning they did themselves. Just secondhand convictions that shatter the moment someone asks “why?”
A mind that can’t be fucked with is a first-hand mind. It doesn’t mean you never learn from others or consider other perspectives—of course you do. But you filter everything through your own judgment. You test it. You ask whether it aligns with your values and your experience of reality. You don’t just absorb and regurgitate.
This is why I created THE DAILY 5 - a framework for interrogating your thoughts and building first-hand thinking. Paid readers have full access to all 12 weeks from Q1 (and Q2 begins on January 1st, 2026!)
