I've written about Stoicism here before, arguing that detachment from your own feelings can be a part of what lets you, perhaps counterintuitively, fully participate in the human experience. The case is that, roughly, by focusing less on yourself, you open yourself to the world outside of you, thereby enabling you to take a more active role in digesting all the emotions and feelings of others.
Looking back, I think this was misguided in multiple ways. For one, though it's important to be in touch with the emotions of others, it shouldn't come at the cost of ignoring or suppressing your own. Your own emotional states are the best lab for learning about emotions. They're right there! If you experience waves of emotion often, with the appropriate introspective techniques, you're in a great position to learn more about yourself, which can be tremendously edifying. If you feel like you connect with your emotions often, maybe it's because you try to step around them, and that could be an indicator that you should start paying more attention. The point is that you don't need to look outside of yourself to learn and feel, and that in fact doing so could potentially be taking away from your ability to connect with the feelings of others in the first place.
Also, I feel like I never really applied this perspective myself, which to me is a classic mark of a suspect theory. Maybe I never believed it that much in the first place. I think I probably saw it as an alternative, poetic, and humanizing take on the Stoics that seemed worth propagating. I probably saw its value as primarily instrumental, as a means to better help others. I still think it's worth being aware of, if not to just be able to steel-man the Stoic thought process even better to provide a more intellectually honest critique.
What got me to reflect on this was a recent conversation with a friend about Stoicism. He is against Stoicism more generally because he sees it as something that flattens your emotional curve. You see, it helps you deal with more negative emotions, like sadness, by reducing the level at which you can fall below your average mood baseline. We all get sad sometimes, but when you get sad as a Stoic, you don't get that sad anymore. On the flip side, this also applies to happiness. Many Stoics said that happiness can be a trap because it's fleeting, and when you come down from it, you can feel worse than you did before that wave of happiness. One logical way to then interpret Stoicism, as my friend did, is to make it so that your peaks in mood no longer stray far from your baseline level of happiness. He argued that this is actually undesirable, because there is something to be said for experiencing the full spectrum during your life. Otherwise, your experience would feel awfully homogeneous.
I have to say that I agree with him. I don't want to be turned into a drone, to be a vegetable. I recently moved to a new city, and that has brought with it a slight, predictable increase in both positive and negative emotion, the usual ebbs and flows that come with a change in life situation, so Stoicism has been on my mind as one of the main stress-fighting mechanisms I have. And I have to say, it feels better to not fight whatever I'm feeling. It drains me of energy, and I just tend to feel more down by default with lower levels of energy. I think this has made it easier to sympathize with the type of perspective my friend holds. I'm not sure there is a way to reduce your negative baseline without also reducing your positive one. But when you do get positive spikes, I feel like those are in moments that life is most fulfilling.
I still think some Stoic principles are really worthwhile and have far less certainty about adopting consistently. For instance, it's important to realize that you can only ever really do your best. As in, if you're disappointed by your lack of progress on some project, but you don't feel like you could have optimized your life situation in any other way to make further progress on it, you should logically have nothing to be upset about. You can be frustrated that your current skill level or whatever doesn't match a person's who would complete it faster, but even that's not something you can change right now. I'm speaking very generally, but if you were to try and acquire new skills, that's a process that takes time. Forgive yourself in the moment. This kind of thinking has been invaluable in helping me during some of the hardest times I've had, and I'll probably continue adopting these principles in the future.
But I think I'd now depart from Stoicism when it says to go further than this and dull the negative emotions you experience. Feel them, to a point obviously. I think it's most helpful to realize that they're temporary, that you'll move past them. I think we aren't encouraged -- especially men -- to not get rid of our emotions. The standard response seems to be, pick up a new hobby, get up earlier, work out, etc. and try to forget about them. Such actions are super useful because they can help us cope with emotions, but I think using these as a tool to eradicate them completely both changes our relationship with the activity [1] and deprives us from valuable information. They have something to teach us, they provide us with feedback about ourselves. They are, to some extent, products of the subconscious, which when approached correctly can spawn a category 5 hurricane of personal insight [2].
I often feel conflicted about which ideas from Stoicism are worth keeping, and whether they can even be adopted and discarded in a modular fashion to begin with [3]. I mean it when I say it has improved my life incalculably. Perhaps a key source of this tension is that I now think what's perhaps most admirable is not suppressing your emotions and moving forward, but finding ways to move forward while really digesting them, which seems to be in some way at odds with core tenets of the philosophy.
I'll end with a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, my favorite writer:
"I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal "sobs" (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?"
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[1] At least from personal experience, when I've found myself doing an activity for the primary purpose of dealing with something negative I'm going through, I only think more about what is worrying me, and less about the activity itself. When I focus on doing the thing for its own sake, even if I'm a bit distracted in the process, I feel like I'm getting more out of it, and am able to deal with the emotion better in the end ('dealing' here is itself a notion that needs more unpacking, but I think you get what I mean). This would be like saying "I'm feeling emotion X, which isn't ideal, but I'm gonna do activity Y because it brings me joy" as opposed to "I'm feeling emotion X, so I'm gonna do activity Y to deal with it". I think this is why I've always been inclined towards physical pursuits such as martial arts, where a lack of focus on the present has high stakes and thus takes me away more organically from whatever else is going on in my life, in contrast to doing something with a certain level of intensity for the sake of taking you more away from the present than usual. Maybe the implication here is that you should find hobbies that just naturally get you into a flow-like state, so you never feel like you do it for reasons other than just intrinsically enjoying it, since then you can always get the full experience, including when you're going through something difficult.
[2] Of course, as noted in the Taleb quote, there are cases where you should try to actively eradicate certain thoughts, such as ones where you're considering any form of self-harm. Luckily, I've never been in these circumstances myself, which means I'm probably not in the best position to recognize when you should try not to feel your emotions (as opposed to just quelling them) for the reason that they will eventually escalate to scarier situations. Again, I'm mainly claiming that you should actually feel your emotions or figure out what they are, if not to only have a better idea of how to go about dealing with them, instead of instinctively opting for the Stoic approach of merely asking "is this within my control?" and then moving on.
[3] This probably applies to most philosophies.