My greatest challenge

My greatest challenge in applying Stoicism consistently in my everyday life will probably strike many readers as surprising or even silly. It is something that I’ve been working on, or at least working at, with a bit of progress from time to time, but with quite a few instances of backsliding, for quite a while. There’s really two parts to it, one of them following the other. They both have to do not with how I react to other human beings, or even other living things, but rather to non-living physical objects. Negatively react, that is, to what I experience as frustrations and irritations with those things not working as I expect or desire them to.

It can happen when I trip on a cord that I forgot was there. Or I set my coffee mug down without paying close enough attention, and spill that staining liquid onto the carpet. Or I need to get something from our storage closet and there’s other stuff in the way. It can even be my technology – my phone, my laptop, my desktop computer, or the apps, programs, platforms, or other software on them choosing to update at an inconvenient time, keeping me from using my device to do what it was I had in mind for a little while.

Two interlinked bad habits

As I noted, I’ve gotten better about this, but it’s still a struggle for me to not give in to a set of two interlinked bad habits. One of these is getting angry with the inanimate object. That’s a really foolish response for someone presumably fairly intelligent to let themselves fall into. And then, the second part of this, I curse or swear. And when I do that, it’s not just expressing exasperation through off-colour language in a general manner. No, that swearing is directed at the thing that I allowed myself to get angry with. 

I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, so this is a reflection of a long-established habit, reinforced by repetition. I could make excuses for it by pointing out the fact that quite a few of my family members, neighbours, coworkers, classmates, among others, set a bad example in engaging in precisely the same sort of behaviour, but when you’ve been an adult for decades, those self-justifications are pretty clearly merely excuses that don’t actually excuse anything. 

Using Stoicism to  temper anger

I’ll level with you. One of my main motivations for getting into serious study of Stoicism many years back was to learn, understand, and apply the principles and practices that philosophy had to offer in the matter of anger. I’ve found the many resources Stoicism provides very helpful in dealing with this complex and troublesome emotion. Very helpful indeed, but not a panacea or proverbial magic bullet. You don’t simply work on anger in the abstract or as a totality. You have to work on each area where it appears and leads you astray in your life. 

Even after years of working to understand my emotional responses and the thought processes involved, deliberately applying key ideas, arguments, techniques derived particularly from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, and making a significant amount of genuine and lasting progress, there’s still more work to be done on my part. Especially in this one irascible lapse, which seems a bit ridiculous when you put it side by side with other failings of anger. 

You’d think that if I can largely avoid getting upset with types of people and actions that used to really infuriate me, where there is at least some agency involved on their part, it ought to be much easier by now not to irrationally get angry with inanimate, intentionless things, shouldn’t it? You’d expect that I wouldn’t swear at them as if they were some malicious person who deliberately contravened my desires, wouldn’t you?

I’ve come to realize that what has been lacking on my part, at least in this part of the vast task (for someone like me) in dealing with my anger, is simply consistency. As I worked on other aspects of that emotion in my life, I’ve for too long given myself a pass in this all-too-everyday matter. This is an area to which I need to start bringing the same attentiveness to habits, desires, judgments, and assumptions that I have done more or less successfully with other dynamics of anger.  

A challenge

As I close this rather confessional contribution, I’ll give you a challenge. Where in your everyday have you similarly been largely successful in applying Stoicism, but with an exception, an area in which you haven’t made similar progress? That might be worth thinking over.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design

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