Why You Should Cultivate Indifference to the Unimportant
This past weekend saw multiple instances of fans running onto the pitch during English football matches. The worst instance, and one that went viral worldwide, was when a Birmingham City fan invaded the pitch in a match vs rival Aston Villa and punched the captain of the opposing team, Jack Grealish. He will now do jail time and has been banned from attending any football match in England for the next ten years. His name and face have been plastered on every newspaper and television station in England, not a good scenario for his future job prospects. Likely fueled by alcohol, and the passion for his team, he made a regrettable, split-second decision, a decision massively important as it relates to his future, but based on something completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
A big lesson of Stoicism is to cultivate indifference to unimportant things. This is something that has taken me a lifetime to truly understand.
Via Epictetus:
“Of all the things that are, some are good, others bad, and yet others indifferent. The good are virtues and all that share in them; the bad are the vices and all that indulge them; the indifferent lie in between virtue and vice and include wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, and pain.”
The reason I used the example football of the football fan invading the pitch as an example is that, in the past, I’ve often let meaningless things like the performance of my favorite sports team ruin my day and impact how I interact with my close friends and loved ones.
To understand the concept of indifference in the Stoic sense, it’s important to understand the context of the term when Epictetus was writing, since it has a different meaning to modern audiences. The modern interpretation of indifference leans more toward someone who is aloof or uncaring. Epictetus’s use of the term was something different.
The moment Birmingham City supporter Paul Mitchell attacked Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish
According to Ryan Holiday in the Daily Stoic the idea of indifference is having proper perspective or a “solid middle ground”. The key line from Holiday is that “cultivating indifference isn’t about avoidance or shunning, but rather not giving any possible outcome more power or preference than is appropriate.”
I’ll give you an example in my own life. I’m a fan of the Green Bay Packers. I love the Packers and my family loves them too. There’s been times though when I let the Packers performance absolutely ruin my day. Case in point. All football fans remember the “Fail Mary”. A few years back the NFL referees were holding out in a contract dispute and the league hired replacement officials to manage the games. The Packers vs. Seahawks game ended on the final play when Seattle’s Golden Tate was awarded a catch on a “Hail Mary” pass from quarterback Russell Wilson, giving the Seahawks the win. It was an absolutely horrendous call.
I was absolutely steamed. It not only ruined my night, but I let it affect the next week. I was constantly reading articles about it, talking to my friends about it, sharing memes about it and concocting scenarios where the NFL would reverse the victory.
I let a sporting event that took place a thousand miles away have a bigger impact on my headspace than it should have. My obsession over the loss impacted my productivity and presence both at home and at work the next few days.
All over a football game.
The bigger point is that the outcome of the sporting event has been decided. The concept of the Stoic indifferent reaction is not that I shouldn’t care about the outcome of the sporting event, but I should accept the outcome either way it goes, because in the end the outcome is beyond my control. Cultivating indifference is all about accepting things as they are. The proper reaction would be to smile, shake my head, and move on to the next week.
Every day we are faced with situations that can force us to potentially lose our cool. Someone cuts us off on the freeway. Someone challenges us at work. A political figure does something dumb.
What if all of this didn’t matter that much? What if when others were upset and overreacting we kept our cool and were clear-headed?
The Stoics were not indifferent in that sense at all, it’s that they were good either way. It’s not that they didn’t care, it’s that they were good either way.
It’s all about not giving something more importance than it deserves. So your team lost, who cares?