Stoicism, as we have said, is not the elimination of all emotion. It’s the regulation of them. Effectively, as Nassim Taleb has said, it’s the domestication of your urges and impulses and knee-jerk reactions. 

It’s OK to be surprised. It’s OK to be scared. It’s OK to be hurt, Seneca said. No amount of philosophy can remove that initial feeling, but what you can work towards is getting to a place where you’re not ruled by these things. 

Feeling love? That’s great. Feeling a desire to help others? Or feeling joy? Wonderful. And contrary to belief, there’s nothing in the Stoic texts about crushing those very human feelings. But feeling rage or bitterness? Seneca has a whole book about the dangers of that. 

We’re putting in our work on the destructive emotions because we know they not only do us no good, but make us and the world worse. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, 

My mother’s advice was, don’t lose time on useless emotions like anger, resentment, remorse, envy. Those, she said, will just sap time; they don’t get you where you want to be. One way I coped with times I was angry: I would sit down and practice the piano. I wasn’t very good at it, but it did distract me from whatever useless emotion I was feeling at the moment. Later, I did the same with the cello. I would be absorbed in the music, and the useless emotion faded away.

A Stoic isn’t an emotionless robot. They’re also not a body at the whim of every feeling originating from the heart and brain. We are in control. Our ruling reason makes the decisions.

P.S. This was originally sent on January 26, 2021. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.