Has anyone found that when one is older it is easier to hide emotion when you feel dis -rescpected or cheated. Outside of a romantic relationship.
I feel there is zero point to express anger or sadness etc. The everyday things that might or would have made me mad in youth just bounce of me. I tend to repsond with answers like “Oh ok I see” rather than a more emotional response. I find it works better; especially by focusing on what I can control rather than getting emotional at what I cannot. Being emotional in the work place or driving has never had a good result. You will likely get labeled as "Nice guy but emotional " I have a kind of self taught psychopathy which sounds bad, but in the long run produces better results in terms of life skills. Does anyone else often use a poker face, not to lie, but to hide displeasure?
arent all taiwanese like this. same … smile???
Anger is probably my biggest weakness in terms of emotional intelligence. I have pretty good control over the others but anger is what bites me more than anything else.
I’ve been using this Stoic philosophy from Marcus Aurelius to help me. When I’m feeling anger, I try to picture myself from above looking at the situation instead of being in the moment letting the anger take control.
You just became Taiwanese dude.
I believe the technical term is “you don’t give a fuck”
And yes, the older one gets, the less fucks are given
Ok.
It’s fairly noncommittal. Not everything is my business, so, yeah— you’re mad at or about something? Uhm, ok.
Never forget that out of Marcus Aurelius’s penis (or maybe not, his wife was an adulterer), came Commodus. 
Wife swapping? Is this a thing in taiwan???
It was in ancient Rome.
Is it general anger, or do you cope with some typical anger scenarios really well, but other stuff absolutely makes you lose your fucking shit, even if it’s very minor?
For me:-
Car gets rear-ended: zero fucks given.
Friend cancels on me last minute: apocalypse
How productive is this, though, really?
If someone is being a fucktard, if you just go “oh, ok” how would they learn that they are being a fucktard and not to fuck with you again?
Let’s abstract this to some bullshit metaphor because it is the internet.
Imagine your soul is a skyscraper, and someone comes along and smacks the foundations with a sledgehammer. The impact to the skyscraper is virtually zero. But if you are responsible for the skyscraper, you’re going to stop that person from smacking the foundations.
So, how do you do that in a Stoic or some other philosophical method when simply asking them to stop yields no results?
Stoic doesn’t equal pushover.
The situation I’m talking about is mostly face to face or direct confrontation/conversation.
If this person is getting to me and I’m not able to just not be there. I just imagine myself looking down on the conversation.
It’s not that I don’t feel anger. It’s that it doesn’t control me. It’s not that I just let people screw with me. It’s that I don’t let my anger screw myself making decisions.
Obviously if someone is threatening me, this would not be a good idea.
1 - Not letting anger take control doesn’t mean you don’t deal with situations.
2.- fucktards are often fucktards because they don’t learn, and you losing your shit isn’t going to get them to learn
That’s true they almost never learn. Being less reactive also gives time to think in a more cool headed way as to how to react and if to react. For example if just some random person you haven’t met and likely to never meet again insults you then let it go. If you have to see them everyday at work then react and deal with it but with a cool head And only after thinking rationally not emotionally. Something like that and its not easy but it gets better with age (I think).
I do it with emails and texts. If I’m triggered I now have this automatic self talk telling me to delay response before sending in an emotional state .
How do you react in a non-angry fashion then, especially without being passive-aggressive? 
I’m not questioning you to be the difficult devil’s advocate, I really don’t know what a better response is. Just walk away and class the other person as useless?
It’s interesting because I got angry at someone a few weeks ago, and I just cut contact for a little while. I think this is my default reaction. I could have just shouted at them at the time, or in some other way expressed my disappointment, but I didn’t see this as productive and at the time I felt I was overreacting. I’ve since said that the event did annoy me but that was a number of weeks later, and I don’t think they really get the full gravity of how fucked off I was. But at the same time, I don’t really want to tell someone they disappoint me. So I initiate the curl-in-a-ball routine. Do you have a better approach?
Being avoidant isn’t healthy either.
It’s not even that I don’t react in anger, I might still be snappy at them.
But what it at least gives me the chance to do is step back and think about what I want to do. I’m the type that would engage more and i’m not adverse to confrontations. The problem is if I lose my cool, I might react in a way that’s strategically bad.
Sometimes you can argue with a fool, instead of letting the fool waste your time, and sometimes others looking don’t know whos the fool, I might just decide to disengage and even just let them feel like they “won” just to not waste my time.
This might be a better option for me than get more upset and angry with them and wasting my time.
If you’re default is to disengage, maybe your issue is more about acceptance.
That’s another aspect I’m working on with my anger. While I don’t handle all customer service for my business, I do check in and jump in when something needs to be escalated to myself. And you know how when you call customer support sometimes and they ask you dumb questions like “did you try turning it on and off to restart it?” and you think NO SHIT!@#@!
Well, there are reasons why they have to waste everyone’s time and ask that. Because those people exist that don’t even think to do some basic common sense. For whatever reason, these people set me off. Instead of getting angry at their stupidity and feeling like they are wasting my time, I’m really trying to just accept some people are like that.
I’ll give you a concrete example of how the method I’m mentioned helped me just the other day.
I’m now doing online courses for beauty professionals. As a brand owner, I can basically sell the courses for nothing and just sell the kits. At the end of the day, I make money from continuous purchases from professional supplies, not really a 1 time course.
One industry trainer got upset at us and confronted us saying we are undercutting everyone blah blah blah.
In my perspective, it’s just business. And why would I not use a competitive advantage of selling the course for $150 with an entire kit of products included when I know it’s more attractive than a trainer offering $200-300 courses with the kit included because they have to buy the kits for their students from brands like mine.
After a while, I realized we werent going to agree and she was just pissing me off. I step back and thought about it like I was looking down at us talking, and realized I should just let her win this arguement and even ask her for advice on what’s a fair price to sell it.
Now I got her off my back and I’ve continued to just sell how I’ve been doing it. She can win that little battle, I’m winning the war.
Hope this makes sense on why this helps me. As previously I would have tried to destroy her and make her feel dumb for even suggesting my business practice is bad when I’m just using a competitive advantage. All that would do is make an enemy and adds nothing.
Let her think she’s won, let me actually win.
Ah yeah, I get you. Yes that’s a better response in that example. You’ve kind of disengaged with that person in your own way, looked at the bigger picture and decided to not act on their viewpoints anyway. If I was her, I’d be more insulted by that (and that is what you want ultimately) if she knew you had listened to her comments and not acted on it.
I try to avoid getting involved when I can recognise poor behaviours in people. I work with a guy who notices issues in our product, valid comments, but small and not really relevant right now. It’s trying to run before we can walk. Things like safety-checking our data outputs. He gets very dogmatic about it and says it needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency, and usually the manager just caves because he can’t think about the bigger picture: we don’t currently have ANY data to output, so why would we want to spend a lot of time now implementing safety-checking for something we don’t have? It’d be like hiring someone to do stock-take every day on an empty warehouse.
I unfortunately responded in a frustrated manner because he got agreement with the management that what I had spent the last couple of days on needs to be scrapped and redone because some bullshit reason and it really is a waste of time, especially as I queried it a week ago and the question was ignored then. They’ve said I don’t need to do the rework (I said it could be done later, like when we actually have stock in the warehouse analogy) but no apparently it’s drop-everything and redo this task pointlessly.
Polishing a turd, honestly. It doesn’t make the product any better, and it frustrates me a lot.
Honestly, this is the acceptance part I’m also working on.
I feel like a significant portion of the population operates in a nonsensical way. It’s frustrating for us that see it.
I’m fortunate to be the owner so I have some control over who’s with me and the final call on issues you brought up. But I struggle and get frustrated at my staff as they don’t understand what I want often.
When I say do A. They can’t connect that A leads to B and the result is C. That’s obviously why I’m saying to do A not for the sake of doing A.
But if I leave clear instructions, for whatever reason this is when they decide they should think for themselves for once and somehow confuse themselves overthinking the instructions when I make it literal as possible.
I’ve had to come to the realization that if they thought like me, they would own their own business so this is just the reality of most employees. We aren’t a top law firm hiring from Harvard only. Our staff are just normal people.
What I’ve been doing is the GB1 technique with them.
G = goals. What are we actually trying to accomplish. Instead of saying do A which to me obviously is meant to get to the goal, most people need to have a clear and result.
B: boundaries. I set boundaries of what they can and can not do to accomplish the goal. I’ve realized if i just leave them be, they get so terrified of making the wrong decision that they actually end up making the wrong decisions as a type of self fulfilling prophecy. I am a personal who thrives in a very loose environment which is probably why I struggled in school. But others like that structure so I try to give it to them.
1 = what’s the first step I recommend they take to get started. Sometimes you have to give this or people get into the analysis paralysis state and don’t even start.
I wonder if there is something you can do at work to better communicate with your boss and colleagues on what to accomplish together