"Not Being Useful" Is A Skill Which Requires Practice

I teach a class for the online therapy platform Better Help which applies Stoic priniciples to practical psychology tools. In this class we read original Stoic writings and participants are invited to think through the concepts brought up by Stoic philosophy in a broader group process. In this twice weekly class, I ran into a bit of a Stoic paradox in myself today for the first time, which I am shocked I haven’t confronted in great detail yet.

image below: me participating in hypermodern platform capitalism

If I am trying to let go of what is external to what I control, but I desire for my teaching to be useful to others, I can not really say that I’ve let go of the desire placed in an external thing which is totally out of my control. This makes me feel unfree by the Stoic line of thought, since I am placing my sense of internal well-being outside of what I have control of.

Not being useful is a majorly important skill, which is to say the reflection of the self as not useful and being accepting of it. We will inevitably try to have purpose and use in the world, and can run into distress if we find ourselves not being of use to someone, or misrecognized in some way.

From Book 9 of his writings, Marcus Aurelius writes:

…most important of all, turn inward to your own self, whenever you blame the traitor or the ungrateful, for the fault is plainly yours, whether you trusted a man with such a disposition to keep faith or whether, when you bestowed a favour, you did not give it unreservedly or so that you received the whole fruit from your act itself then and there. For when you have done good, what more, oh man, do you wish? Is it not enough that what you did was in agreement with your nature and do you seek a recompense for this? As if the eye asked a return for seeing or the feet for walking; for just as these were made for this which they effect according to their proper constitution, and so get what is theirs, even thus man is made by Nature to be benevolent, and whenever he contributes to the common stock by benevolence or otherwise, he has done what he was constituted for, and gets what is his own.

I write about self-interest theory a lot and bring things back to the primary concept of self-interest, which inevitably involves the urge to be good in various ways, to be pro-social, to connect with other people, be virtuous at various times and in general, etcetera. At a certain point, the dismissal of this pursuit is necessary in order for us to have what the Stoics describe as the freedom that comes from grounding our desires and expectations strictly in our own actions, and to be able to dismiss what is not.

The motion of dismissal is the thing which requires practice. To say that it is nothing to you that your Idea of good did not appear in the world or in the other or even in yourself as recognized by yourself or the other person is not easy. We desire to think of ourselves as useful and good, and to be recognized this way.

This is ultimately the gateway by which our good actions turn on us and destroy us.