Easier said than done

It’s easier said than done, not letting things get to you that you do typically find disturbing you. That’s true in general, and it’s also the case with many more specific matters. If you’re bothered by the common experience of seeing a disconnect between a person’s character being good or bad and how they seem to get treated by life, you can’t just simply resolve not to be bothered, snap your fingers, and then you’re suddenly unaffected. You certainly can try that, but you’ll discover for yourself how ineffective that is. If you are upset by something, Stoics would say, there are reasons why you’re affected in that way. They’re not necessarily good reasons, though. One of the strengths of Stoic philosophy, studied in depth by spending the time and effort required by the classic texts and thinkers, and then applied as a way of intentional living, is helping us to understand reasoning processes (usually implicit until we bring them to light) that stand in the way of genuine happiness, leading us somewhere else.

When others don’t care, don’t understand or are even hostile

Committing oneself to studying and practicing Stoicism when other people you are involved with don’t understand Stoicism, don’t care about Stoicism, or are even hostile to Stoicism, poses a challenge, particularly for several different sorts of people. One of these is beginners who are still new to studying and practicing Stoic philosophy. Another is people who are drawn to evangelizing about the path of intentional living they’ve decided upon. A third is people who take their cues about what’s true or good a bit too much from what other people around them think or say. One could, of course, hit an unfortunate trifecta of belonging to each of these groups. In the case of each of these groups, there are likely going to be some mistaken and unclarified assumptions about matters that then lead into lines of erroneous reasoning, and result in the person feeling upset, troubled, anxious, angry, disappointed, or sad.

Ask yourself why it matters to you

One useful way to approach this kind of situation is to ask yourself why it matters to you whether other people understand or even know about Stoicism. Or why it matters to you whether they have any feelings, positive or negative, about Stoicism Or whether they have something negative to say about what they think Stoicism to be. And “matters”, when we are considering these common cases, is a term one has to unpack different possible meanings of. You could take it to mean something that a person feels invested in, perhaps to the extent that they make their happiness or unhappiness dependent upon it. You might also take it in a very different way, meaning something that has some sort of value, positive or negative, that one grasps but without this having to lead to an emotional reaction.

Others don’t have to follow our path

The latter is not only just fine from a Stoic point of view, but actually quite good. You do want to recognize realities as such, without needing to distort them into something other than they are. Just because you’ve decided that Stoicism is something valuable for you, and you’ve taken the time to study it, practice it, figure out where you got things wrong and correct those, that doesn’t imply that any other person has to follow the path you took, or even care whether it exists. Much like any philosophical school or figure, the classical Stoics had many critics. Why should that be any different in our own present-day?  

You could be right in thinking that if people close to you just recognized how helpful Stoic philosophy could be for them, their lives would be better, focused on proper priorities, less prone to messed up lines of thinking, emotional responses, decision-making, and problematic patterns. You’re probably right about that. But it’s entirely possible to realize that, and to rationally desire they would be receptive to Stoicism, study it, and apply it in their lives, without allowing the fact that they don’t understand, don’t care about, or even dislike Stoicism to get to you.

Three reminder of Epictetus

It might be useful to remember three things Epictetus reminded his own students about  Socrates himself. 

One of these is that Socrates himself kept in mind that none of us control another person’s ruling faculty (4.5). 

The second is that Socrates himself, continually exhorting and arguing that his fellow citizens should care for themselves, had a track record of getting maybe one out of a thousand to decide to do so (3.1). 

And the third is that we’re not all called to be like Socrates. Zeno and Diogenes had different roles than Socrates (3.21). We ourselves likely have different tasks than those three. 

But one thing we can be sure about is that allowing ourselves to get upset or dismayed because other people in our lives aren’t interested in following Stoicism isn’t among those tasks.

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

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