What is Emotional Intelligence?
The case against emotional suppression.
Welcome! A quick update before we begin- I’m in the final stages of editing The Stoic Manual: Meditations on the Art of Living, a collection of 150 Stoic meditations on living well. It’ll be released soon and included free for all Annual and Lifetime members.
“When anyone provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.”
—Epictetus
“It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing…for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements.”
—Marcus Aurelius
“We ought not to accept an appearance without examination.”
—Epictetus
Sometime in the second century, Aulus Gellius was travelling across the Ionian Sea from Cassiopa to Brundisium when the ship entered a violent storm.
Water poured into the vessel. The passengers worked the pumps through the night. At dawn the sky grew darker, the wind intensified and strange cloud formations appeared above them. Gellius believed the ship might sink.
Among the passengers was a respected Stoic philosopher whom Gellius had known in Athens. Gellius turned to watch him. Here was a chance to see whether philosophy worked when death seemed near.
The philosopher had gone pale. His face showed fear.
After the sea settled, a wealthy passenger approached and mocked him. How could a Stoic, who claimed that fear came from judgment, appear as frightened as everyone else?
The philosopher eventually opened the fifth book of Epictetus’s Discourses and showed Gellius the answer. He explained that...