How the Stoics dealt with difficult people

The Stoics wrote about other people from long experience. Epictetus was enslaved for part of his life, Seneca served for years as an adviser to Nero, and Marcus Aurelius passed his days as emperor among courtiers, generals and petitioners. What they left is practical: what to tell yourself before you see someone, what to do with an insult, what you still owe them, and when to leave. It works for the merely annoying, too, like the coworker on speakerphone or the neighbor with the leaf blower.

Expect them before you meet them

Meditations 2.1 is the best-known Stoic text on the subject, and it begins before anyone has been rude.

The list is a forecast, not a complaint. Marcus isn’t hoping for a day without busybodies. He is telling himself they will turn up, so that when the colleague who replies-all to correct your grammar does it again, the only news is that the forecast was right. What sets us off is often less the rudeness than the protest we attach to it: people shouldn’t act like this. In Meditations 11.18 Marcus calls it madness to expect bad people not to do wrong, because that is wanting the impossible.

The second sentence explains the behavior. People act this way “by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil” (Meditations 2.1). They are wrong about what matters. You wouldn’t despise someone for misreading a map, and for the Stoics, misreading what is good is the same kind of mistake, only larger. The entry goes on, in our paraphrase, to the part that matters most here: whoever does wrong shares Marcus’s own nature, nobody on the list can stain his character, and he has no business hating any of them. Humans, he says, are built for cooperation, like the upper and lower rows of teeth.

You can read the whole entry with a plain-English reading, and make it part of the start of your day with the Stoic morning routine. If you know 2.1 from a modern translation, the list is worded differently there; this site quotes George Long’s public-domain version of 1862 (see which translation to read).

They act on what seems right to them

Epictetus gives the shortest version of the Stoic explanation for bad behavior, and a sentence to say when you meet it.

Everyone acts on their own view of a situation, never on yours. The neighbor who leaves a curt note about your trash cans thinks he is defending the street. The manager who rewrites your proposal overnight believes it is better now. They may be wrong, and if they are, Epictetus says, the mistake is their loss: “he is the person who is hurt” (Enchiridion 42).

“It seemed so to him” is the line to keep. You can say it and still argue about the trash cans or fight for your version of the proposal. What drops away is the sense that the person is doing this at you, which is usually what makes a reply come out sharper than you meant.

Seneca wrote a longer version in On Anger, with his own daily forecast and a working image for what to do next.

The owner of Seneca’s leaking ship doesn’t waste time being angry with the sailors or the timbers. He bails, plugs what he can reach and keeps going, and that is the attitude Seneca recommends toward the people around us: “not an enemy to but an improver” (On Anger 2.10). You may never change a habitually difficult colleague. You can still keep the water out of your own work: confirm decisions in writing, keep the meetings short, raise the one issue that matters and let the smaller ones go.

How the Stoics answered insults

Much of the Stoic advice on rudeness, disrespect and criticism comes back to one short chapter of Epictetus.

Words are sounds, and a comment calling your slides “sloppy” is a line of text. What makes it an insult is a judgment you add, usually fast: they’re making me look stupid, they think I’m incompetent, I can’t let this stand. Epictetus places the injury there: “it is your opinion about these things as being insulting” (Enchiridion 20). That is good news, because an opinion can be examined, and examining it takes time. Hence his advice to delay. Don’t answer the email for an hour, and don’t answer the comment in the meeting while your face is still hot.

Disrespect works the same way, though it is often a pattern rather than one remark: being talked over, left off the invite, answered in one word. Each time there is the event and the meaning you give it. The first is a fact. The second is up to you.

Criticism: deserved or undeserved?

Seneca wrote a whole essay on injury and insult, On the Firmness of the Wise Man, and chapter 16 has two questions worth asking whenever you’ve just been criticized.

First, is it deserved? If you really did forget to send the agenda again, the comment is not an insult but “a judicial sentence” (On the Firmness of the Wise Man 16), and the sensible reply is to set a reminder. If it isn’t deserved, “he who does injustice ought to blush, not I” (16). The embarrassment is the critic’s to carry, not yours. Seneca adds that many insults only state the obvious, like a joke about your height or your hairline.

Epictetus has a drier suggestion for when someone reports what another person has been saying about you. Don’t defend yourself; say that the critic obviously doesn’t know your other faults, or he wouldn’t have mentioned only these (Enchiridion 33, in our words). It is hard to stay offended after saying that.

None of this requires silence. You can correct a false claim, ask a colleague to stop, report harassment or answer a public attack in public. The Stoic point is to do it because you decided to, not because the insult pulled the words out of you. For the anger an insult sets off, see how to deal with anger, the Stoic way.

Your duties remain

A difficult person is rarely a stranger. It is a sister, a co-parent, a manager, a father-in-law: someone you can’t simply stop seeing. Epictetus starts these cases from the relationship, not from the behavior.

Ask what your role asks of you here, not what the other person deserves. Your brother has been unfair about your mother’s care; you are still his brother, and the question is what a good brother does now. Perhaps that means answering the next message plainly, keeping up the parts of the care that are yours and declining the parts that aren’t. “Do not examine what he is doing, but what you must do” (Enchiridion 30) is not a gag order. It moves your attention to the half of the relationship you actually run. The Stoic idea of roles is set out under roles and duties.

A caution about the cut. Before he gets to the brother, Epictetus deals with fathers, and there he asks a son to put up with reproaches and even blows. On that point we part company with him: honoring a relationship has never meant accepting violence. See difficult is not the same as abusive below.

When people get in the way

Marcus has a harder-edged thought for people who block your work rather than wound your pride. In Meditations 5.20 he says he must do good to people and put up with them. But insofar as someone obstructs his proper work, that person becomes one of the indifferent things to him, like the sun, the wind or a wild animal. They can stop an action, but not his inner disposition, which adapts and turns the hindrance into help. A popular modern slogan is drawn from this entry; see the obstacle is the way.

Kindness is not weakness

The Stoics asked for more than tolerance. Marcus thought it was characteristic of human beings to love even the people who wrong them, and he gave himself four reasons.

They are kin. They act from ignorance. You will both be dead soon. And they haven’t harmed you, because your “ruling faculty”, the part of you that judges and chooses, is no worse than it was. The last reason carries the weight. If what someone does can’t make you worse, you can afford to wish them well.

None of this requires liking someone, trusting them or lending them money again. In practice it comes down to wishing them no harm and answering them in a way you won’t be ashamed of later. That fits with saying no, with ending a conversation, with telling a relative plainly that a comment was unkind. In Meditations 11.18, Marcus even pictures answering someone kindly in the middle of their attempt to hurt him; the anger guide sets out that whole list. Dealing honestly and evenhandedly with someone you dislike is an exercise of justice, one of the four virtues.

Behind the kindness is a line Marcus drew between his life and his neighbor’s.

If your good depended on what other people choose, “my neighbor’s wickedness would be my harm” (Meditations 8.56). Marcus holds that it doesn’t, and this is why Stoic kindness isn’t weakness. Someone who needs to be liked, or needs the other person to change, is at that person’s mercy. Someone who has settled what kind of person to be can be courteous to a rude relative and ask nothing back.

Toxic people and keeping your distance

Toxic is a modern word, but Epictetus knew the problem: some people’s habits rub off on you. He advised his students to be wary of close company until their own principles were fixed (Discourses 3.16).

The warning is about influence, not hatred. If an evening with a certain friend always ends in gossip, in drinking more than you meant to or in feeling worse about your own life, that is the soot. Seneca gives similar advice about friendship: pick friends with as few strong cravings as you can, because vices pass from one person to the next like a disease in an epidemic. Above all, he says, avoid the person who grumbles at everything, however loyal (On Tranquility of Mind 7, in our words).

Marcus closes 2.1 by warning himself against irritation and turning his back on people. Read alongside Epictetus, we take him to be warning against resentment, not distance. Seeing someone less often, keeping conversations to what is necessary, leaving a group chat or even a job are choices about your own time and company, and those are up to you. You can wish someone well from across town.

Difficult is not the same as abusive

Everything above is written for ordinary friction: rudeness, unfairness, a sibling who knows which comment will land. Abuse is different. Someone who hits you, threatens you, controls your money or your movements, cuts you off from friends or makes you afraid in your own home is not a difficult person you should learn to be patient with.

Stoic patience does not mean staying. The line Epictetus draws between what is up to you and what is not, now called the dichotomy of control, points the other way here. Whether they change is not up to you. Your own actions are: leaving, telling someone, calling for help, making a plan. Courage is a Stoic virtue too, and protecting yourself and any children in the house can take a great deal of it. You don’t need to be sure that what is happening “counts” before you reach out.

Work through it now

If someone has just gotten to you, the free Anger exercise takes about three minutes and follows the method on this page: what happened, the story you added, what is up to you, a teaching from Epictetus, the virtue you want to act from and one thing to do next.

After the encounter, the Evening Examination asks what outside your control disturbed you today, which is usually where a difficult person turns up. The other situations the app covers are on I Need Perspective.