That’s The Thing With Anger | Is It Normal For A Stoic To Cry?

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0:56That's the thing with anger. Sometimes it's righteous. Sometimes it's understandable. Sometimes it's motivating. Sometimes it's a long time coming. But you know what it always is? It's always ugly. Indeed, it is the ugliest of all the emotions, Seneca writes. It distorts, it sullies, it degrades. And unlike the other passions, it comes at the expense not just of ourselves, but of others. There's a great lyric in a Sam Fender song that feels like it could appear in Seneca's famous essay on anger.

1:40beauty and leave you spent when I want to offer. But you hurt the ones who love you. Seneca advises us to look in the mirror when we're angry, to see how we've transformed. And what we find is often shocking, a face distorted by rage, barely resembling our true selves. Actually, when I reach into my pocket, I pull out the pause and reflect medallion we made for Daily Stoic, you sort of get this, right? There's a reason it's shiny on the front. It says pause and reflect, but it literally gives you your reflection. It's supposed to give you, oh, I don't like this look, right? Because you don't look any different than other people when they get upset, which is to say ugly and dangerous.

2:26We can look at the receipts to understand the cost of our temper, right? The stuff we broke, the relationships we exhausted, the people we hurt, the opportunities we blew, the toll is often greater than we realize. Think about what you could have done, how your relationships could improve if you didn't so often fall victim to angers, destructive ways, if you could wake up each day, if you could respond to the aggravating things in life with peace and clarity. That's one of the things we talk about in our Taming Your Temper course, which is an 11-day sort of stoic deep dive into what the Stokes can teach us about anger.

3:06And then of course, that's what the coin is about. You can grab both of those now. We're discounting them as a bundle, 20 bucks off when you bundle the course with the medallion. And you can have the ideas and the tangible reminders together. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check it out.

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4:51Stoic at checkout. That's human with two N's dot com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

5:34My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

6:11Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

6:31CNN just called and they asked if I would do a segment for them on crying. I guess there's this college football player who broke down and was crying in a press conference and some people were making fun of them. I got two little brothers and my mom and dad and I, yeah, that's the tough part of that being here. I love them a lot and and I miss them. I think people assume that stoicism is emotionlessness or invulnerability or superhuman-ness or something, but that's not what it is at all. And so I'm actually very excited. This is something I want to address. I'm obviously a man. I have two young boys.

7:00This idea that a stoic can never cry, a stoic can never be sad, it's just total bullshit. So I'm excited to address this on television. This is about as dressed up as I get these days. Got a shirt, test the levels. Crazy, who makes fun of someone for crying? What kind of a jerk do you have to be? Like, who do you care? He's a kid. He's 19. He's sad. Let's talk about this with writer and philosopher Ryan Holiday, who hosts the Daily Stoic podcast. He also wrote the book The Daily Dad, a book on stoic philosophy designed for fatherhood. Ryan, great to chat with you as always. The response that I've seen online to this has been overwhelmingly positive.

7:35People have empathized with Wilson, but some are mocking his display of emotion. They've called him a crybaby, a wimp, saying that he should get a girlfriend and just FaceTime his family. Why do you think that this expression of emotion from a young man, a football player, elicits these kinds of responses? I think it makes us uncomfortable. Maybe we think would our son miss us that much that far across the world? The irony of it is that sports are incredibly emotional. That's why we love them. And there's certain kinds of emotions that we accept from athletes, you know, anger. We might even accept crying in happiness.

8:12But as soon as it sort of veers into a place of vulnerability, then we get uncomfortable and we judge and we condemn. I told you last time that we spoke that the next time we would chat, I would nerd out about Marcus Aurelius. And I'm about to do that, being that you're a proponent of stoicism. This idea that many of our emotions or passions cloud our reasoned judgment, that we shouldn't dedicate energy to things we can't control. Do you think that Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would tell Archie Wilson to stop crying? I've got Marcus Aurelius behind me on the shelf, and I know from the historical record that he wouldn't.

8:52We have four stories about Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, breaking down into tears. A famous one actually involves him as a young man, probably Archie's age. One of his favorite teachers dies, and he starts to cry, and one of the other philosophers comes up to him and tries to tell him to stop, that this isn't manly, this isn't what we do. And actually then Emperor of Rome Antoninus stops the teacher and he says, let the boy be human. He says, neither empire nor philosophy takes away natural feeling. And we have stories about Marcus crying in grief over an earthquake, over the plague. We even have a story of him crying when he loses the chance to grant clemency to one of his arch enemies.

9:32So, yes, the Stoics were about not being blinded by or deceived by our emotions. But that doesn't mean they didn't have them and that they weren't human beings. I think there's something different about crying in a press conference because you're sad and then being so debilitated by it that you can't play or that you turn around and go home. And so that's what stoicism is. It's not the elimination of the emotion. It's the understanding of it, the processing of it, the being aware enough to have it and then deciding what you're going to do after. I think some of the chatter online about this specific incident is sort of a microcosm of a larger question about masculinity.

10:12And I want to ask you about why you think masculinity has become so political and in some ways a commercial product. These tough guy retreats and boot camps and influencers that peddle a certain vision of masculinity. It seems like there's a demographic of men out there who are responsive to the idea that manhood itself is under attack. I wonder if you think it is. Well, there's this sort of performative, insecure masculinity that seems to be very concerned with what other people do and how other people live. Even if you wouldn't cry in this situation, why does it matter to you that somebody else who's objectively tough, objectively in great shape, objectively great at what they do, who's courageous enough to move to a new country and, you know, play an American sport?

11:01it's something we should be impressed by. And instead, I think instead of being impressed, some people are threatened by that or they feel the desire to mock it or make fun of it. I am concerned with what I'm doing, with my emotions in my life. I don't spend a lot of time that concerned about other people's masculinity. And I guess that is not a common view these days, unfortunately. Ryan Holiday, thanks so much for joining us. His new book, Wisdom Takes Work, is now available for pre-order. I didn't get to tell this story in the interview because you only have a couple minutes on camera. But when my son was six, he had to change schools.

11:44This is a pandemic. We were changing from one teacher to another teacher. I remember saying, hey, buddy, are you sad? How do you feel about it? Because I knew he really, really liked this teacher. And he said, oh, I don't care. And I remember being taken aback by it because I know that he did care. But But there was some part of him that even at that age, that young, he felt threatened or overwhelmed or uncomfortable with that emotion. And he was suppressing. And I thought, oh, this is where it happens. And so you might think someone who writes about Stoic philosophy, my impulse would be like, yeah, that's right, buddy.

12:14No, I was like, hey, it's okay. If you're sad, you can cry about this. You can be upset by this. This doesn't change that he still has to change schools. I think, again, this is what people mistake about Stoicism. You can have the emotion. You still have to do the thing. You can be scared, but you still have to do the thing. You can be sad, but you still have to do the thing. That's the stoic part. That's where the virtue of courage comes in, in still doing the thing. That's what it's about. I'm really glad they had me on to talk about this because it's something I think about a lot. It's something I think about in my own life.

12:43There's nothing stoic about stuffing the emotions down and pretending that you don't have them. To me, the stoic thing, the philosophical thing, where wisdom is, is to be able to process those emotions, to explore what they mean, to decide what you're going to do as a result of this feeling, to allow yourself to be human, as Antoninus said to Marcus Aurelius' teacher. I just think it's so interesting that we will judge an athlete for crying over missing his parents, but then it's apparently badass when Tom Brady breaks his iPad or when athletes get in a fight. All of this is losing your cool. And in fact, if there's any sort of loss of control or emotion that I think we want to be more critical about, that we want to put more energy towards helping people curb, it's that, right?

13:23It's the getting upset. Because what does that solve? What does that make better? What example does that set? Again, we'll let them cry if they win a national championship and his punt is what seals the game. But at the beginning of the season, when he's exhausted, when he's tired, he's going through all the stuff he loses, he cries then, there's something wrong with him. That's ridiculous. So anyways, done. And now I'm going to go pick up my kids from school. If you want to keep your stoicism-inspired journey going, sign up for the Daily Stoic email at dailystoic.com slash email. It's one Stoic inspired email every single day.

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