Take a (much) broader perspective
According to the Stoics, negative emotions—or “passions”—are unhealthy because they grab hold of your attention and ability to reason, practically forcing you to focus on the perceived problem. With this narrowed view, the problem will seem much larger than it actually is. Isabella experiences this firsthand—she’s still fuming over how the mechanic cheated her, even a week later. Whether sitting down to work or to dinner, she stews over it. All she can think about is how he charged her way above the estimate, and how she now has new problems with the transmission that didn’t exist before she took the car in. This week’s exercise is to widen that narrow, unhealthy focus, putting things into perspective to help anyone who stews over problems.
"The agitations that beset you are superfluous, and depend wholly upon judgments of your own. You can get rid of them, and in so doing will indeed live at large, by embracing the whole universe in your view and comprehending all eternity and imagining the swiftness of change in each particular, seeing how brief is the passage from birth to dissolution, birth with its unfathomable before, dissolution with its infinite hereafter.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.32
Marcus Aurelius had bigger fish to fry than Isabella did. Much bigger. He had to deal with two frontier wars, against the Parthians on the east and the Marcomanni and other German tribes on the north; he had to face the worst plague to strike the ancient world, possibly causing as many as five million deaths; and he had to put down a rebellion initiated by one of his trusted governors. All the while, he was of fragile health and had no previous experience as a military commander. No wonder he so often resorted to what modern Stoics refer to as the “view from above” meditation in order to put his troubles into a broader, cosmic perspective.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that contemplating the vast expanse of time and space will simply solve your problems. At the end of the day, Marcus still had to wage war and take concrete actions against the plague and his governor. Similarly, Isabella’s bank balance is objectively lower than it would have been had her mechanic been honest, and her car still needs work, which would not have been the case had her mechanic done his job properly. Stoicism does not magically make these problems disappear—but it does invite you to think about them in a different, hopefully more helpful way.
When Marcus tells himself in his Meditations that the agitations of his mind are superfluous, he is saying that nurturing one’s anger at an injustice (“I’ve been overcharged by the mechanic!”) is not going to redress the injustice itself, and moreover that these agitations will keep you miserable for days, weeks, or months. Your misery is self-inflicted and doesn’t help you remedy the initial offense. In this sense, it is completely under your control whether to keep harping on what was done to you, or to stop and shift your attention toward something more constructive. Perhaps Isabella may file a complaint against her mechanic with the Better Business Bureau, while at the same time checking online reviews of other local mechanics to find a better one.
Marcus takes us one step further and teaches us how to halt an unproductive train of thought: He compares his admittedly big problems (millions of lives at stake) with the grand expanse of time and space. This reminds him that no matter what he thought was so important, it will soon be forgotten and will become but a footnote in history. Again, the idea is not to cultivate callousness—the war still needs to be waged, the car still needs to be repaired. Rather, we should calm down about it! This equanimity will allow us to better tackle whatever problem we face.
If considering your problems in the context of the entirety of the universe is too broad a perspective, try one of the following variations. The first is to consider the problems that feel most significant to you in comparison to another (much more serious) class of situations, putting your own into perspective. Take the sort of issues that people like Marcus had to deal with regularly. Surely the fact that Isabella’s mechanic overcharged her by a few bucks isn’t even remotely in the same ballpark as having to deal with war, betrayal, and pestilence, is it? The second variation—again in order to gain a healthful perspective—is to remind yourself that your experiences are not unique. Plenty of other people have been swindled by unethical business owners, and plenty of other people have had to look for another professional once they realized that the first one was not reliable. You decide which version of the view from above is most useful to you. Just remember that keeping things in perspective is both emotionally helpful and practically beneficial.