I Don't Care

[Cod]

The not losing control part is important, I think. If it's a situation where standing your ground is important -- if it's your career or something at stake -- then that's necessary. But in a case where standing one's ground gains nothing and only prolongs vituperation, I don't see any good for it. Control would imply that one knows when standing one's ground makes a difference, and when it just becomes an insult match.

Yeah, that's why I said that I sometimes bite my tongue. I'm able to recognise when it is appropriate to stand my ground, I wasn't really talking about petty internet arguments.

This is what I jokingly call Freud's Hydraulic Theory of the Emotions. He often wrote as if emotion was a fluid that builds up and needs to be released from its storage tank. I think this metaphor has become so common that people don't imagine an alternative -- there may be times when the emotion doesn't have to be spewed out all over everybody. 

But again, if saying it makes some difference, fine. 

What is your alternative? Bottling up feelings IMO is never a good way to go, as I said before for me it works, I feel better getting things off my chest and in my experience it stops molehills from becoming mountains.

And I was thinking today on the bus about Marcus Aurelius.

Whatever floats your boat

To say that always behaving well necessarily makes one a doormat seems to me a dangerous moral commitment. It almost could lead to the belief that not being a doormat demands repayment in kind for every imagined slight. That's the kind of thing that leads Americans to shoot each other over how they stack their garbage cans.

I disagree. You're far more likely to lose the plot if you bottle up emotions over a period of time. Take your American dustbin neighbour shooter, if he'd only gotten things off his chest in a calm and controlled way, Dave bin stacker might still be alive today.