How Much Sad Do You Think You Have? | 10 Stoic Tips For Handling Rude People

There are going to be moments of life that make you question just how much a person can possibly take. But there is that inner-citadel within you as well. Cultivate it now, reinforce it and it will be even stronger and more dependable when you need it.🎶 Lyrics mentioned are from So Long, London by Taylor Swift📕 Grab a copy of Hardship and Happiness (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca) at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  How much sad do you think you have? Seneca must have thought that things were about as bad as they could possibly get. He'd just buried his only child. And then, and then he got word that he'd been brought up on false charges and would be exiled to the middle of the ocean. Marcus Aurelius must have had the same thought as he buried one child after another in the middle of a flood and a plague and a forever war. Musonius Rufus got exiled just like Seneca, at least three, possibly four times. They must have been surprised despite their Stoicism. They must have been staggered by the weight of this. They must have asked, as we've said before, haven't I given enough? They must have been surprised to find out how much sadness was possible in life, how dark things could get. To quote another song lyric.

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  So each of these men and women, for we seem to gloss over what their wives thought upon hearing the same news, they kept going, they persevered, they rebuilt. They found that in addition to the deep well of pain inside them, there was also a cabinet of fortitude, an inner citadel upon which they could draw. Seneca didn't just keep going, he wrote a series of moving essays called his consolations. They helped his mother and his friends through their own grief. Here's our favorite translation, we carried in the painting porch. Marcus Aurelius led the empire. Musonius Rufus famously discovered an underground spring that brought water and life back to the desolate island he was marooned on. There are going to be such moments, years, maybe even decades of life, that make

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  you question how much a person can possibly take. You'll wonder how you even have tears left. But there's an inner citadel within you as well. And if you cultivate it now, reinforce it now, it will be even stronger and more dependable when you need it.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  So obviously, a lot has changed over the last 2,000 years. One thing that hasn't changed since the time of Zeno, or Seneca, or Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, is people, is human nature. There were annoying people then, there are annoying people now. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode, Stoic Strategies for Dealing with People Particularly Difficult, Frustrating, Obnoxious, and Annoying People.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  Some fucking psychopath near where I live decided that my road was a good place for them to dump two dead dogs and two dead goats. Maybe they couldn't afford to dump it. Maybe they were doing something highly illegal. I don't have time to think about it. That's one of the things in Meditations Marcus Aurelius talks about. He says, "Don't delve too much into what lies underneath. What are you going to do about it?" Every time I drive by it, I'm complicit in it after a certain point by allowing it to continue. The other thing I'm going to do is one of the most powerful things in Meditations. He says, "The best revenge is to not be like that." And then in another passage in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "Be careful not to treat human beings the way that inhumanity treats human beings." The point is, don't be changed by the shittiness, the cruelty, the arbitrariness, the selfishness of other people.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  But I can decide not to be implicated in it. I can decide not to be changed by it for the worse. But most of all, I can choose not to be the kind of person that drives by it over and over and over again and just lets it stand, which is what I'm doing today.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Famous quote from Marcus Aurelius, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." And it's funny, it's actually in Book Five of Meditations. What Marcus Aurelius is talking about is people. He says, "In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us, like sun and wind and animals." He says, "Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions, because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way..." Comes the way. So when he's saying the obstacle is the way he's specifically talking about difficult people. He's saying that people are an opportunity to practice virtue,

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  difficult people, most of all. What these people are is a chance for you to try to do things differently. I think it's a wonderful phrase that people are our proper occupation. We are put here for each other. We are social, political animals, as the ancients would say, and our job is to figure out how to work with people, to get things out of them, to not be corrupted by them, to not be broken by them, to not let them turn us into assholes or sons of bitches, not to let them change us in a negative way, but actually when we deal with difficult, frustrating, or annoying, or obnoxious people, as Marcus really starts book two of meditations, lamenting all the things that people are going to do, people are there for, is to present us opportunities to grow and change and learn and do good for them and the world.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Five rules from the Stoics that will help you handle rude and difficult people in your life. First and foremost, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Marcus really says, you have to recognize in the wrongdoer a nature similar to your own. They are us, we are them. Two, accept that rude people are a part of life. They are inescapable. Wake up in the morning and tell yourself, I'm going to see rude people. I'm going to see idiots. I'm going to see selfish people. It's a fact of life. You can't go around being surprised when you see something you knew you were going to see. Three, the best revenge to the Stoics is living well. Marcus really says, the way you get even is by not being like that. Four, try to be indifferent. We want to live a good life, Marcus really says, and then be indifferent to what makes no difference. If other people suck, if other people get away with being

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  awful, is that going to change us? Is that going to make us want to be different? No, it doesn't matter. Five, we want to zoom way, way, way out. When you see things from a distance out of an airplane window, it becomes so much smaller. You don't take these people so seriously. And then you move on and you focus on what's up to you.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  People suck. It's just a fact. And one of the fascinating things about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is how often he returns to this very theme. He opens the book with a catalog of the kind of people you're going to meet in the day. Frustrating people, jealous people, stupid people, dishonest people, aggressive people. It's just a fact. Even his famous passage about how the obstacle is the way, the impediment to action advances action, you know what he's talking about? He's talking about difficult people. He's not saying you write them off. He's not saying you cut them out. He's not saying you give up on humanity. He's saying that difficult people are an opportunity to be kind, to be patient, to be good, to get the most out of them. The obstacle is the way even is about this very idea. Difficult people exist and we have to put up with them and figure out a way to work

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  with them. And we have to rise to the occasion of the people that we interact with.

• 7:23Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius was a guy who met his fair share of jerks. But he said, you know what you're supposed to do when you meet a jerk? You say to yourself, is a world without shamelessness, without jerks possible? He says, no, then this is one of those people. They are playing that role. And when you can start to see people, even the frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people that you meet in your life as playing a role assigned to them, a role that someone has to do, that there is no version of the earth where there are not annoying, obnoxious, awful people, right? Then you can accept them, you can tolerate them, you can also understand, right? That they are in a minority. It was inevitable that eventually you would bump up against one of these people. And now you have. It's no more and no less than that.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you to BetterHelp for sponsoring this video, a longtime supporter of The Daily Stoic. And I think what they do is important in relation to Stoicism because there's this image, this stereotype of the invulnerable Stoic, the person who never needs help, who never asks for help. This is something that Stoics themselves very explicitly push back on. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about how we're like soldiers storming a wall. We have to ask a comrade for help. He says, so what? If you need help, if you want to talk to someone, so what? In fact, I think it's a positive good. I think it's something you should do. BetterHelp is the world's largest therapy service and it's totally online. I do my therapy online for that reason. It's hard enough to find time to spend an hour with someone talking about your stuff,

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  data drive and traffic and getting there early and getting back. It's just a giant pain. It's better to do it remotely. Let BetterHelp connect you with a therapist right now, all from the comfort of your own home. Visit betterhelp.com/dailystoke right now or choose Daily Stoke from the dropdown to get a special discount when you start right now.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius's reminder is a life-changing one. He says, "You don't need to have an opinion about this." He says, "You always have the power of having no opinion." If it's pointless gossip, if it's trivia, if it's something that doesn't concern you, if it's something you have zero control or influence over, just let it be. Don't have an opinion. You don't have to say it's positive or negative. Epictetus says, "It's not things that upset us. It's our opinions about those things. It's our judgment about those things." So we have the power to not think about it, to tune it out, to focus on what really matters, to try to put our energy and our intention on where we can make a difference, on where we do have control. And if other people want to be concerned with them, if other people want to be riled up or have opinions about them, if it's their job to do it, leave it to them.

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  Meanwhile, you let it float on by like the clouds and you stick with what's up to you.

• 10:01Ryan Holiday?

  In Book 11 of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about something that must have been very common for him, which is that people didn't like him. People cursed him, they criticized him. They questioned his integrity, his commitment, all these things. So in Book 1113, he says, "Someone despises me? That's their problem. Mine?" He says, "Not to do or say anything despicable." Says, "Someone hates me? Their problem." Says, "Mine," and this is the prescription of Stoicism, he says, "mine is to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them, ready to show them their mistake, not spitefully or to show off my own self-control, but in an honest, upright way." That's what we should be like inside, he says, "And never let the gods catch us feeling anger or resentment." I just think that's a beautiful kind of jujitsu of it.

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, look, if someone doesn't like you, that's their problem. That's something they're carrying around. It doesn't affect you. If you didn't know about it, you wouldn't think about it at all. And the important thing is that you don't let it change you. You don't let it affect you. Don't let it make you like them. You just lock on to what you have to do and you try to be patient and kind. You try to think better and do better for other people than in fact, they might ever even think of doing for you.

• 11:10Ryan Holiday?

  If you do anything that matters, people will have really strong opinions about you. That's just like a fact of life. If you don't like that, don't do anything. And we can imagine that people had strong opinions about Marx, Rilis and Seneca and Epictetus. Anyone that's ever put themselves out there in the realm of ideas or in the, in the arena of life. People have criticized. You have to be able to tune that out. Marx, Rilis says, we love ourselves more than other people. Yet for some reason, we care about their opinions more than their own. I love, I'll get criticized for my books. A person will be like, oh, he did X, Y, and Z as a criticism. But it's like, that's exactly what I was trying to do. And you realize, oh, not only is this person's opinion like not worth listening to. If you heard it properly, you'd see that they were actually complimenting you. So you, you have to, you have to be able to, to tune out what other people say and do. You have to focus on what you do.

• 11:53Ryan Holiday?

  That's what the Stoics say, to develop kind of an inner scorecard where you understand what you're trying to do, how you judge or measure your success. And it can't have anything to do with critics, with doubters, with haters, with your parents, with your spouse. It, it has to be based on your own understanding of what you're trying to do, of who you're trying to be as a person. That's what matters and that's what you measure yourself by.

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things we have to strive for as Stoics is to have better boundaries. Stoics talk about being self-contained, about not being rattled by what's happening outside, of managing your own crap, of controlling the inner citadel, your own soul, not vomiting your stuff onto other people. That's part of it, but also not allowing other people to vomit all over you, their problems, their issues, their, their lack of self-control, the things they want from you. You have to sort of keep up some defenses. You also have to be strong enough, confident enough, self-controlled enough, polite enough to say, I don't really want to do that. I'm not comfortable with that. I don't like that. I'm not okay with that. Here's what I am willing to do instead. To me, boundaries are really about being a responsible, mature, communicative adult

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  who sets the rules of engagement for your own life, for your interactions with other people. And if you can't do that, as they say, a country without borders is not a country. A person without boundaries isn't a person.

• 13:20Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius reminds us to meditate often on the interconnectedness of everything in the world. He talks about at night, when you see the stars, he says, "Imagine yourself running alongside them. Imagine yourself up there." Whenever I watch a sunset, whenever I people watch, whenever I look at some beautiful pieces of scenery, I try to think about humanity as one giant whole. I try to think about all the generations that have ever lived, all the ones that will ever come. And I try to remind myself that we're all connected, we're all part of this, we're all one enormous organism. As the Stoics try to remind us, what's bad for that organism is bad for us. We're all connected, we're all part of this, we all share this. And I try to never forget that. I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe.

• 14:04Ryan Holiday?

  But what I really want you to subscribe to is our Daily Stoic email. One bit of Stoic wisdom, totally for free, to the largest community of Stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years. And I hope to see you there at dailystoic.com/email.