Day 15 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
There’s a version of Stoicism that says: don’t feel.
Suppress your emotions.
Be rational.
Treat feelings as weaknesses to be eliminated.
That version is wrong, and unfortunately common.
It does real damage to people who take it seriously.
Here’s what the Stoics actually said about emotion.
They distinguished between two categories.
The first they called pathê, usually translated as “passions”: emotional states driven by mistaken judgements.
Fear of something that isn’t actually dangerous.
Desire for something that isn’t actually good.
Grief over a loss that, rightly understood, was never yours to keep.
Anger at something outside your control.
These states were rooted in error, not in the fact of being emotional.
The error made people act badly: it caused them to misread the situation.
The second category they called eupatheiai, good emotions, rational emotional responses.
Joy in place of shallow pleasure.
Caution in place of fear.
Wishing well in place of selfish desire.
The Stoics actively cultivated these: emotions grounded in accurate judgements rather than distorted ones.
Seneca wrote extensively about anger in a three-part essay, De Ira, On Anger, one of the most forensic examinations of a single emotion in classical literature.
Anger, as typically experienced, is almost always counterproductive in his account, because it arises from a judgement that someone has wronged you in a way that demands retaliation.
That judgement is almost always wrong, exaggerated, or focused on something outside your control.
“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
~ Seneca
Seneca wasn’t denying the original harm.
What anger does to you, the energy it consumes, the decisions it corrupts, the relationships it damages, the time it takes, almost always exceeds the harm that prompted it.
For vegans, this is particularly charged territory.
The anger that comes with knowing what happens to animals, not the abstract policy knowledge, the specific, vivid knowledge of individual animals in industrial systems, is real, proportionate to what it’s responding to, and completely understandable.
The Stoics would not dismiss it as an error.
What they would ask is: what are you doing with it?
Anger, in Stoic terms, is informative.
It tells you that something has been assessed as wrong.
That information is valuable.
The question is whether the anger then moves you toward effective action.
The kind that actually changes things, or whether it becomes the dominant fact of your inner life, consuming the energy that would otherwise go toward the work.
The distinction matters practically.
Someone angry about animal agriculture who channels that anger into effective advocacy, consistent action, and the patient work of cultural change is using their anger well.
Someone equally angry who spends their energy arguing on social media, alienating potential allies, and burning through their own emotional reserves without producing change is not.
The anger in both cases might be identical.
The relationship to it is different.
Seneca’s prescription for anger is essentially Stoic: when you feel the heat rising, pause.
Create distance between stimulus and response.
Ask what the situation actually requires, rather than what the anger is demanding.
Respond from that cooler, clearer position, which usually produces a better outcome than the response anger would have generated.
Most vegans will recognise a specific version of this immediately: the moment in a conversation when someone says something dismissive or offensive about veganism, and you feel the impulse to respond at full emotional pitch.
Seneca would say the impulse is information.
The feeling is real.
The best response to that situation is almost never the one the anger wants to deliver.
The anger isn’t wrong.
The goal is persuasion, or connection, or at minimum the preservation of your own equanimity, and anger deployed in full almost never achieves any of those things.
The Stoic goal was appropriate emotion: feeling what the situation actually warrants, in proportion, directed toward what can actually be done.
That’s a harder target than either feeling nothing or feeling everything freely.
It’s also more useful.
Practice for today
Read the first book of Seneca’s On Anger, available free online, about twenty minutes.
Then identify your most common emotional trigger in the context of vegan life.
Write: what judgement sits underneath that anger?
Is the judgement accurate?
And what response would actually serve the situation better than the anger wants to deliver?
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.