Negativity versus Stoicism

ProTip … you don’t have to look at the firehose at all. It’s not required. You can unpin it. You can never click on it. You can curate your own feed and make your own columns and just live your life without that nonsense and without reacting to it. You have a CHOICE.

There is no reason to feel the need to flood something you don’t need to even be interacting with. If the firehose is so upsetting to you that you feel like you need to try and (force) flood it with positivity …

STOP
INTERACTING
WITH
IT

Everything about how you use CoSo is your choice. You have a ton of control over how to make your experience here as healthy as you want. That’s the great thing about CoSo. Make use of those tools. Curate. Filter. Pin positive things for yourself to see and interact with.

Randomness is great … magical even … until it starts making you feel like you have to push back (at it) with positivity. That tells me that the balance is off. So, do you trade balance in the hope of random magic? Maybe for some people. But the fact that there is a hashtag (FloodTheFirehose), tells me that there is more imbalance than magic.

That desperate need to try and plug a fire hydrant with your pinky thinking it’s going to change how that stream of negativity makes you feel is futility and self-abuse. You have to turn away from negativity and/or counter it WITHIN. So many people left the Hellmouth to get away from the constant streams of negativity, unpredictability, and trauma … interacting with it constantly on the CoSo firehose under the guise of “trying to make it better” is only harming you further and keeping you from healing.

Stoicism has been a part of my life from my early philosophy studies days in the 90s. I would say it’s the foundation of how I came so far in my healing process throughout my life. Stoicism is still heavily misunderstood, mostly by people who simply choose to remain ignorant of the truth, but it has many relevant tenets that are crucial within the world we live in even now. I’ll share some info here for those interested …

This is all from an essay I wrote online sometime around 2014.

Stoicism was a philosophy that flourished for some 400 years in Ancient Greece and Rome, gaining widespread support among all classes of society. It had one overwhelming and highly practical ambition: to teach people how to be calm and brave in the face of overwhelming anxiety and pain. There are several famous stoic philosophers including Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Nearly all religions have a foundation in stoic principles.

The Stoics sought what they called apatheia – the state of mind where one is free from emotional disturbance. It is a positive term referring to the act of nullifying emotional responses to things outside of our control. Apatheia is the best and most rational response to the world in which we accept that we cannot control things caused by the will of others or by Nature and that we can only control ourselves and our reactions to said external events.

And apatheia does not encourage a loss of feeling or an indifference to emotions, but rather it seeks to bring you closer to clarity and rationality using logic, reflection, and concentration. Mindfulness was a very important aspect to obtaining apatheia.

The Stoics believed that unhappiness and evil were the result of human ignorance to their own value within the universe and that the solution was to examine oneself fully and determine where your understanding of yourself veered off from the reality of your purpose.

Proper moral decisions require knowledge of the world and of one’s place in it which means you have to begin from a state of true understanding of how everything you do affects everything else.

Anger, in Stoic philosophy, is caused by the violent collision of hope and reality.

Some stoic seeds of wisdom:

• If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment.
  
• If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
  
• The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
  
• Any person capable of angering you becomes your master.
  
• Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.