Sit With Them Anyway

Good day, Stoics. 🫡

Somebody you love is going through something and you can’t fix it.

You’ve offered the solutions. They didn’t want solutions.

So now you’re sitting there feeling like a spare part, and underneath that there’s a worse feeling you don’t say out loud. Some part of you wants them to hurry up.

Not because you’re callous. Because watching is unbearable and fixing was the only tool you were issued.

Epictetus writes about exactly this, and the passage has been used badly for two thousand years.

He says when somebody is grieving, don’t get swept into their distress on the inside.

Then he says the part everyone forgets. Sympathize with him. And if the occasion calls for it, groan out loud right along with him.

People quote the first half and drop the second, and it turns Stoicism into a permission slip for being distant.

The whole point of the passage is that you’re meant to do both.

You can decline to be destroyed by their pain and still sit down inside it with them.

In fact you have to decline the first part in order to manage the second. Somebody drowning alongside them isn’t company. That’s a second emergency.

What they need is a person whose footing is good enough to still be there in an hour.

That’s the whole job.

Not a fix. Not a lesson. Not a silver lining you went and found on their behalf.

Presence, from somebody steady enough to keep supplying it.

A reader put this exact question to me back in January. He’d slowed down enough to start noticing how much the people around him were struggling, and he wanted to know how to help without sliding back into old habits. What came out of it is the closest thing I’ve got to a manual: When You Notice Others Struggling. The short version is that noticing somebody struggle obligates your character. It doesn’t obligate your intervention.

The phrase behind “groan inwardly” points at something more precise than sadness.

Epictetus is separating the outward act of being with somebody from the inward act of adopting their verdict that the situation is unbearable.

You can hold a person’s hand while quietly not agreeing that this is the end of the world. That isn’t dishonesty. It’s the thing that lets you still be holding on tomorrow.

And there’s a reason he thought it mattered so much.

The Stoic view is that judgments are contagious. If you conclude alongside them that this is a catastrophe, you’ve added a second person to the catastrophe and removed the one calm surface in the room.

Being unmoved isn’t the goal. Being unswept is.

Who needs you present more than they need you useful?

Hit reply and tell me.

Stay steady. ⚔️

Join the discussion | Read past issues | YouTube