What is Stoicism and how can people live like that?
In: Culture
Ok, so what you need to work on is thinking about how you think/react to things.
Let’s say you’re driving on the highway and another driver cuts you off. You could get angry at the other driver (either in true “road rage” fashion or just fuming and being mad about it on your own all day) or you can just realize that, since no harm was done in the end, you can just let it go and not let it bother you.
You’re going to have an immediate reaction to the surprise of having the other driver cut in front of you quickly like that, and likely a burst of adrenaline. You cannot help this reaction.
What you *can* control is the response that you have to that reaction. Your own mental state is under nobody’s control other than you yourself. This means that the only thing that *can* make you upset is *you*. You have a choice and an option is to just… let things go. If you remove the thought of “I am hurt”, you remove the hurt itself.
So, when you have that immediate reaction to a stimulus, you get practiced at going through this thought loop of whether things “matter” or not and after doing it a lot you can get to the point where it takes almost no time at all and therefore hardly have outsized emotional reactions in the first place. A modern problem is that people often expect men to be “stoic”, by which they mean this lack of emotional response, but we do a terrible job actually teaching/practicing the mental work necessary to make this a natural response.
Latest Answers