When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
– The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Book II, CH.1.
Sometimes people suck. Sometimes people really suck.
Sometimes people suck so fucking much that you wonder how they survived being as stupid and cantankerous as they are, without getting punched in the face several times throughout the course of their miserable existence. You know the type. Nothing’s their fault. They’re the unluckiest people in the whole world. Someone’s out to get them, and so on and so on until you can’t roll your eyes any further. You try to offer advice, or even actual help, but it’s like trying to draw blood from a stone. They might quite possibly be hopeless.
And then, you remember that your only responsibility is to your own progress, and that their inability to benefit from your “wisdom”, if that’s what we’re to call it, is not up to us. Then you just go back to doing what you do and maybe even forget that you were annoyed for a minute.
I tend not to forget any of my transgressions. Even if I don’t lose my temper on difficult people, or just write them off as hopeless cases, I still feel that anger inside me and since it never finds an outlet, it simply becomes guilt, and the overwhelming feeling that maybe it’s me that’s hopeless. The overwhelming feeling that I’m never going to be able curb my strong emotions and find that inner peace that’s so appealing about living a philosophical way of life. It’s disheartening to me, filling me with a sense of dread that makes my usual existential crisis feel about as troublesome as a stubbed toe.
Seneca recommends waiting before acting on anger, which is actually very common advice nowadays (despite most people not even waiting the usual count of 10 before “bitching someone out”). Waiting helps us get perspective. Better yet is to see the situation from outside of yourself, to get some cognitive distance from the things that bother us so much. Things are neither good nor bad, but our judgments of things, these are in our control, and can be good or bad. Definitely not bad if we choose to see other people as awful wretches of human beings and just give up on them, which in the quote that started this post, is akin to working against another person.
Other people’s faults are not in my control. My judgments are in my control. My ability to see things rationally and withhold judgment instead of reacting impulsively is in my control.
My ability to do my best, fix what I can, and be patient while I do, is in my control.