Has Tom Hodgkinson captured the truth at the heart of Stoicism and Taoism – or is he just being annoying? You decide

I was lying in bed one morning when I came up with what I considered to be a very pithy aphorism with the flavour of an ancient Taoist text. I’d been reflecting on one of my problems, which is being annoying, and also on Stoic wisdom. The result was this:

“There is no annoy. Only annoyed.”

In these six words, I felt, I had captured the truth at the heart of both Stoicism and Taoism, which is that we make the world with our thoughts. I don’t actually annoy anyone. It’s their fault for getting annoyed. It’s the same thought that Milton expressed, but less succinctly, in Book One of Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

A few days after conceiving this koan I decided to try it out in the real world. On a walk with a group of old friends, I proudly recited my philosophical truth.

“Jesus, that’s annoying,” said M.

Of course I hadn’t considered that my thoughts on annoyingness might themselves be extremely annoying.

But societies have often objected strenuously to philosophers in their midst. Famously, Socrates was executed by the Athenian state for being annoying. In the Apology, his defence speech at his trial, he tells us how he annoyed his fellow Athenians by exposing their lack of wisdom. He is, he says, “the kind of person who wakes you up, prevails upon you and reproaches each one of you and never stops landing on you all day long.”

People didn’t really like this sort of behaviour, he says: “As a result of this questioning I incurred a great deal of enmity of a very harsh and grievous kind.”

The jury found him guilty of impiety by a vote of 280 to 221 and sentenced him to death.

Well, I’m making an effort to avoid getting annoyed at things that happen to my external being. Being annoyed is all in the mind. I can choose to stay unruffled when a daft tourist walks out into the middle of the road while I’m cycling through Notting Hill, rather than submitting to my immediate desire to shout, “For fuck’s sake!”

You might object that being annoyed is not necessarily a bad thing. John Lydon was quite annoyed when he wrote Never Mind the Bollocks. Sarah Wynn-Williams was quite annoyed when she wrote Careless People, her brilliant portrait of the amoral nature of the higher echelons at ad sales group Meta. Gandhi was quite annoyed when he launched a campaign of passive resistance in order to liberate India.

He was also extremely annoying, not least to Winston Churchill, who is supposed to have said in 1930: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.”

Did you find this email annoying? Write back to us at mail@idler.co.uk.

Live well,

Tom

PS Idlers in the US may be interested to learn that my new book, How to Live Like a Stoic, is now out in the States. “A delightful book… lively, funny and effortlessly educational… wise and wonderful”, said the Daily Mail.

“A Drink with the Idler” returns later this month.

SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Please add your thoughts in the box below.

Sir: While I did not find your email annoying, it did rankle a bit. On the one hand, I fully believe that perceptions colours how we interact with the world. I take public transportation to work and it is sometimes late; some people get very upset about this and I usually don’t – can’t control the train. On the other hand, I have children. My son (15) is of the same opinion as you. He believes that there is nothing wrong with the volume of his videogames, the words that come out of his mouth unfiltered, or his less than stellar organizational skills – the onus is on me for being bothered by it. So, yes, we choose to be annoyed, but it doesn’t follow that others don’t need to change to be less annoying.
Annie Nickum, Librarian

Sir: You asked me to reply if I found the Is Wisdom Annoying? Newsletter annoying. While I’m assuming the point of said newsletter was to be annoying, and I appreciate what it’s doing, it was nevertheless annoying. Specifically, comparing yourself to Milton (“…same thought that Milton expressed, but less succinctly…”), Socrates, and Gandhi was the most annoying and self-serving part of it. However, I’m assuming this was by design…which has triggered me into writing this annoying email…or rather, an email that is annoying only if you are annoyed by its reading…
Wannabe Idler

Sir: There is no annoy. Only annoyed – Tom Hodgkinson is brilliant, and must be true. It complements so well the learning I received in my youth from The Threonic School of Phanboi Threon, which I have carried with me ever since. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
Juana

Sir: While I certainly sign up to your philosophy on the idea of annoyance as far as humans go, I am wondering about its universal applicability. Our peace of mind is, of course, the only thing that no-one can take from us. Yet, despite it being our last and best defense, we still succumb to giving it away willy-nilly to, for example, tourists striding into the road without looking. (Or to politicians striding into other countries without looking, come to that.) My 23-year-old son has yet to outgrow the “it’s so annoying” response to just about everything. I am perpetually bestowing upon him my wisdom about the need to grow in tolerance instead of choosing to let everything bother him. I don’t think he can yet process the concept of having a choice about his response. Perhaps he hasn’t yet heard it espoused on TikTok. But once it is, that ought to solve it. Meanwhile, I’m not sure that your koan is applicable beyond our interactions with humans. Can one maintain equanimity while being assailed by midges, or mosquitoes? Does being slightly bothered not naturally evolve into being somewhat disturbed, and  escalate into true annoyance, and then full-blown bloody outrage, taking us into the “For fuck’s sake” realm? Are we not genetically programmed for annoyance in the face of things that might hurt us (hovering wasps, for example), much in the same way that we are programmed to feel fear, and run, in the face of a lion? I suspect that St. Francis may have been alone in maintaining joyful equanimity while being swarmed or bitten to buggery by insects of any stripe. Which is all to say, your post did not annoy me at all. I can attest that not permitting myself to become annoyed by others has made for a much more peaceful and loving existence over the years. But that does not translate into there being no such thing as annoy in the world, much as that would be nice. My neighbour’s large, free range dog has been greatly annoying me lately by racing into my garden and grabbing my al fresco sandwich before I am half way through it. Very much looking forward to meeting you in a few weeks in Assisi. Please try not to be annoying, except in private, or toward insects. All good things,
Mary Collins

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