My Journey with Stoicism: How I Messed It Up
Alright, so everyone's been yapping about Stoicism, right? How it’s the key to not losing your mind in this crazy world. I figured, hey, sounds good, sign me up. I was going through a pretty rough patch myself – you know, the usual life stuff kicking you when you're down. Work was a nightmare, personal life wasn't exactly a walk in the park either. I needed something, anything, to stop feeling like crap all the time.
So, I dived in. Got the books, the whole shebang. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus – I was trying to absorb it all. The big idea, as I saw it, was to control what you can control, and let the rest just wash over you. Don't get upset, don't get angry, don't get too happy either. Just be… chill. Indifferent. That was the goal, or so I thought.
And here’s where things started to go sideways for me. My practice, well, it was basically me telling myself off every five minutes.
- Felt angry about something at work? Nope! Bad Stoic! You can only control your response. So I'd try to just swallow it.
- Felt sad about, well, anything? Wrong again! External things shouldn't affect your inner peace. Bottle it up, buddy.
- Stressed about the future? Oh, come on, that’s just silly. Focus on the present moment, you idiot.
It was exhausting. I wasn't becoming a calm, wise sage. I was becoming a tightly wound spring, a robot trying to suppress its own programming.
The real kicker? I started feeling more isolated. My friends would be talking about their problems, their joys, and I'd be there trying to give some detached, "stoic" response. I probably sounded like a heartless jerk. Or worse, like I wasn't even listening. How can you connect with people when you're trying so hard not to feel anything, or at least not show it?
And the suffering? Oh, it was there. It just changed its flavor. Instead of suffering from life's events, I was now suffering from my own internal war.
- I'd beat myself up for not being "stoic enough." Like, "Damn, I felt a twinge of annoyance. I'm a terrible Stoic!"
- I was constantly policing my thoughts and emotions. It was like having a tiny, judgmental Epictetus living in my head, constantly telling me I was doing it wrong.
- And the stuff I was suppressing? It didn’t just vanish. It festered. It came out in weird ways – sudden bursts of irritation over nothing, or just this heavy, gray feeling hanging over me.
I remember one time, something genuinely upsetting happened – a project I’d poured my heart into at work got completely scrapped for no good reason. My "stoic" response was to just nod, say "It is what it is," and walk away. Inside, I was raging, but I just pushed it down. Later that week, I snapped at a cashier for giving me the wrong change. Totally out of proportion. That was the suppressed anger, leaking out like toxic waste.
The 'Aha!' Moment (More Like a 'Duh!' Moment)
This went on for a good while. I wasn’t happier. I wasn’t calmer. I was just…numb, and secretly miserable. The turning point wasn't some grand revelation. It was more like a slow dawning. I was talking to an old friend, someone I hadn't seen in ages, and they just looked at me after I gave some "philosophical" non-answer to a personal question and said, "Man, what happened to you? You seem…gone."
That hit me. Hard. "Gone." Was that what Stoicism was doing to me? Making me disappear?
So, I stopped trying so damn hard to be some emotionless rock. I actually went back and reread some of that stuff, and thought, maybe I got the wrong end of the stick. Maybe it wasn't about not feeling, but about not being ruled by your feelings. Big difference.
I started to allow myself to actually feel things. Annoyance? Okay, I'm annoyed. Why? What can I do about it, if anything? Sadness? Yeah, this sucks. It's okay to feel sad. It doesn’t mean I have to wallow in it forever, but pretending it's not there? That's just dumb.
What I found was that by letting myself feel the emotion, acknowledging it, it often just…passed. Or at least, it became manageable. It wasn’t this big scary monster I had to wrestle into submission anymore. It was just a feeling. A piece of information, even.
So, was Stoicism the cause of my suffering? Well, yes and no. My brand of Stoicism, the one where I tried to surgically remove my emotions and beat myself up for being human, yeah, that was a one-way ticket to misery. I turned a philosophy of resilience into a tool for self-punishment. It’s like using a hammer to brush your teeth – wrong tool, wrong application, painful results.
These days, I still think some of the core ideas are useful. Focusing on what you can control? Absolutely. Being mindful of your reactions? Good stuff. But the whole "suppress everything and be a Vulcan" approach? Nah. That’s not for me. Turns out, being human is kind of the point. And part of that is feeling all the messy, inconvenient, wonderful feelings. Who knew, right?
