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Making the Most of Your Emotional Life With Seneca

Bridle Your Feelings to Control Your Destiny

Steven Gambardella
The Sophist
11 min readJan 1, 2025

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Vincent Van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate) (detail), 1890. (Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Too often we hear that Stoicism is opposed to feeling emotion. What nonsense. Trying to live without emotions is like trying to live without a head. Emotions are fundamental to reason, and not diametrically opposed as is often thought. They provide the multicoloured tapestry of our inner life and help steer our decisions. But emotions can be damaging if they run away from our control and turn into something that the Stoics called “passions”.

It’s worth noting that the modern meaning of the word “passion” is different from the ancient one. In the modern world, passions are seen as positive — we can be “passionate” about things we enjoy or find important and, of course, we can have “passionate” loving relationships. The original meaning of the word was negative — it comes from the Latin patior, meaning “suffer”. So for the Stoics, “passions” were where emotions run out of our control and become disturbances of the soul which cause us to be irrational.

These passions include excessive caution in the form of fear, excessive desire in the form of greed and lust, and more complex or ambiguous emotions like jealousy, distress and sadness, but also other seemly pleasurable emotions like glee. On every occasion, we can see that sense has been…

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