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

Seneca advises us to look in a mirror when we're angry to see how we've transformed. What we often find is shocking—a face distorted by rage, barely resembling our true selves. 🪙 Carry The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/anger-medallion as a reminder to pause. A pause creates space. A pause creates clarity. A pause can change everything. | Get $20 off when you purchase the Pause & Reflect Medallion and Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Course for Controlling Anger https://store.dailystoic.com/cart 🎶 Lyrics mentioned are from Seventeen Going Under by Sam Fender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DzHEJrdGJ8 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ 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 https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  That'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.

• 1:47Ryan Holiday?

  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. We can look at the receipts to understand the cost of our temper.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  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 Stoic deep dive into what the Stoics can teach us about anger. And 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.

• 3:15Ryan Holiday?

  And you can have the ideas and the tangible reminders together. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check it out.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  CNN 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.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I've got two little brothers and my mom and dad and I... Yeah, that's the tough part about being here. I love them a lot and I miss them.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  I think people assume that Stoicism is emotionlessness or invulnerability or superhumanness 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. This 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. Shirt.

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  Test the levels. Crazy. Who makes fun of someone for crying? Kind of a jerk do you have to be like, who do you care? He's a kid. He's 19. He's sad.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  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. People 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?

• 4:56Ryan Holiday?

  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, anger. We might even accept crying in happiness. But as soon as it sort of veers into a place of vulnerability, then we get uncomfortable and we judge and we condemn.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  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?

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  I've got Marcus Aurelius behind me on the shelf, and I know from the historical record that he wouldn't. We 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.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  We even have a story of him crying when he loses the chance to grant clemency to one of his arch enemies. So, 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 gonna do after.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I think some of the chatter online about this specific incident is sort of a microcosm of a larger question about masculinity. And 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.

• 7:38Ryan Holiday?

  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 play an American sport? It'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.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Ryan Holiday, thanks so much for joining us. His new book Wisdom Takes Work is now available for preorder.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  I didn't get to tell this story in the interview because you only have a couple of minutes on camera. But when my son was six, he had to change schools. This was the pandemic. We were changing from one teacher to another teacher. I remember saying, hey buddy, you know, 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 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 it. And I thought, oh, this is where it happens. And so you might think that someone who writes about Stoic philosophy, my impulse would be like, yeah, that's right, buddy. No, I was like, hey, it's okay. If you're sad, you can cry about this. Like you can be upset by this. This doesn't change that he still has to change schools.

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  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. There's nothing Stoic about like 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 Antonina said to Marcus Aurelius, his teacher.

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  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, you know, 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? It's the getting upset because what does that solve? What does that make better? What example does that set? Again, we'll let him 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, cries then, is something wrong with him? It's ridiculous. So anyways, done. And now I'm going to go pick up my kids from school.

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

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