You Must Look Beneath The Surface

<p><a href='https://dailystoic.com/practical-stoic-exercises/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=beneath-the-surface'>Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus</a>, like all Romans, seemed to have loved the theatre. </p><p><a href='https://dailystoic.com/seneca/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=beneath-the-surface'>Seneca, in particular</a>, had a great fascination for what “actors in theatre who imitate the emotions” could teach him about dealing with people in real life. Many actors appear “most dangerous when they redden,” Seneca observed, but “they were letting all their sense of shame escape.” From that, he realized that with Sulla “when the blood mantled his cheeks” it was always “due...to the novelty of a situation.” And “Fabianus also, I remember, reddened when he appeared as a witness before the senate; and his embarrassment became him to a remarkable degree.”</p><p>Evan Puschak, creator of the wildly popular <a href='https://geni.us/9crpMQG'>Nerdwriter YouTube channel</a>, made a great video a couple years ago, titled <a href='https://geni.us/vq7TmeA'>“Jack Nicholson: The Art of Anger.”</a> The video is not only an eight minute montage of Nicholson’s very entertaining freak outs, it’s a distillation of a very human emotion. Like Seneca, Puschak wanted “to get a sense of the larger shape of anger as a human phenomenon.” Here’s what he learned:</p><p><em>For Nicholson—and everybody else, for that matter—anger can be a form of desperation, a noise so loud that you don&apos;t have to hear your own insecurities. The larger and louder it is, the closer he is to recognizing a vulnerability in himself. That&apos;s the challenge for an actor playing this emotion. You&apos;re not just playing anger; you&apos;re playing what&apos;s under it. Most anger isn&apos;t psychotic. It&apos;s only a thin veneer for what&apos;s brewing below, and you have to be able to turn up the volume while preserving traces of this deeper motivation. </em></p><p>This is a really