7 Stoic Strategies To Deal With Jerks

The Stoics understood something we tend to forget: jerks are not anomalies. They are a fixed feature of human life, as predictable as bad weather. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius asked himself a disarmingly simple question when confronted with someone's shamelessness: "Is a world without shamelessness possible?" The answer, of course, is no. There have to be shameless people, just as there have to be dishonest people, vicious people, and untrustworthy people. "This is one of them," Marcus told himself. Recognizing that the whole class has to exist makes you more tolerant of its individual members.

The antidote is built into the problem

Marcus went further. Nature, he observed, gave us qualities to counteract the defects we encounter in others. "As an antidote to unkindness, it gave us kindness." This is not passive acceptance. It is a call to action. When you meet a dishonest person, you respond with honesty. When you meet greed, you respond with generosity. When you meet cruelty, you respond with kindness. The difficult person is not an obstacle to your virtue — they are the occasion for it. This is what Marcus meant when he wrote that the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way. He was not talking about some abstract philosophical puzzle. He was talking about the specific person in f