No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control. If losing your job is traumatic to you, that is a sign you need to work on improving your detachment from outside factors. Obviously we all have bills to pay and would like to keep a roof over our heads, but being traumatized by losing a job is an extremely unhealthy (and abnormal) response.

> No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control.

I don't think this opinion is realistic or helpful. Being fired has an important impact on your happiness and the quality of life of you and your family, specially if the next job forces your family to move.

Some people are forced into homelessness when fired. Are we supposed to pretend that losing your home does not hamper your happiness?

It's unhelpful to suggest we should not stress about things outside of our control, because we still need to deal with them.

If one is relying on their job for food/clothing/shelter, it is necessarily traumatic to lose those things. Perhaps for you, losing your job does not constitute a traumatic event, but anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck it most certainly would be.

Well I suppose then no one should be traumatized by getting cancer or from permanent injuries from an unprovoked violent attack.

After all, those are things we have no control over. No sense in being traumatized by them.

That is the main idea of stoicism. So although I realize your statement is meant to be sarcastic, I wholeheartedly agree. It’s a very difficult bar, but it is incredibly enriching and conducive to inner peace and a harmonious life. I have lived my fair share of highly traumatic experiences and I feel qualified to say that stoicism is a viable way forward when it seems that there is none.

I think I kinda forgot that not everyone has stoic framing for their viewpoint with my original post lol. You do an excellent job of saying what I meant without describing things in a way that many (maybe most?) people would misconstrue. Thank you.

I can’t speak for others, but as the op of that quoted segment, I say it as a person who has lost their job several times in my life. The first time was traumatic because my expectations were of stability. Never again. Really, it was the best thing that could have happened to me because it taught me the proper way to think about employment. At this point I can’t imagine putting that level of control of my life in anyone else’s hands.

I think they are saying you should look at the employment relationship more generally and see that this holds across the board.

It’s more like a woman breaking up with a man and someone else says “realize that all men are pigs”.

That's an interesting parallel. I suspect the point is that entering all relationships with the expectation that all men are pigs carries certain benefits, but then it also likely has costs, such as an inability to form truly deep connections.

Many societies are deeply partiarchal and misogynistic. Men can mistreat their wives with impunity. So is the solution to eschew men? Not if your somehow healthy existence is predicated on having a male companion.

Still there might be private spaces to speak frankly about such a state of affairs.