Seneca's On Anger

I recently read Seneca's essay On Anger. He makes a compelling case for the problems of anger, and makes a decent rebuttal to the charge that anger is sometimes useful. For handling anger, Seneca generally gives the normal Stoic philosophical points: essentially saying there is no use getting angry if you have not been harmed.

Seneca includes many quite gruesome and horrible examples of anger, which make pretty good stories (more on this in a later post). I like to imagine that if he was writing today, his examples would include the textbook case on the stupidity and futility of anger: Zidane's provocation and expulsion in the 2006 World Cup Final, which arguably cost France the World Cup.

I've been trying to get anger under control in my own life, and I think I have. I don't believe I ever had an unusually bad problem. Just normally bad. I'd get angry at my kids, my spouse, my computer, anything. What's worse, getting mad at an inanimate object, or getting angry at your loved ones? I still do lose control, occasionally. But not that much, and I don't get as angry. There's another benefit as well: by me not getting mad, everyone seems to be getting along better.

I've become used to checking my anger, and, surprisingly, sometimes I no longer even feel it. I don't even get mad at the idiot on his cell phone standing right at the top of the stairs to the subway. Now, I can accept the subway idiot as a fact of life, and just go around.