“By refusing to commit and thus maintaining your autonomy you retain the initiative: Your moves stay matters of your own choosing, not defensive reactions to push and pull of those around you. Slowness to pick up your weapons can be a weapon itself, especially if you let other people exhaust themselves fighting, then take advantage of their exhaustion.”
Robert Greene
“Numb” is the third single from Linkin Park’s Meteora. Released twenty years ago, it was one of those songs that just took off into the stratosphere. At the moment, it’s sitting on 1.3 billion streams on Spotify, while on YouTube the music video has racked up 2 billion views and 13 million likes.
It tells a familiar story. It could be a child sick of the pressure of living up to the expectations set of them. It could be an employee feeling the pinch of a toxic workplace culture. Or anyone dealing with any sort of pressure at all. “Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow,” as the band’s emcee, Mike Shinoda, says. Pressure. Endless, endless pressure.
Two common Stoic principles to keep in mind here:
- Knowing what you can control and what you can’t;
- How you can respond to what happens.
In one of his letters, Seneca says to “mind our own business.” This is true for our expectations of others as much as it is for their expectations of us. That’s one possible answer. I can’t say what will work for anyone else, but I tend to refer to Robert Greene’s bestseller, The 48 Laws of Power.
One law from this book that sticks out is “Law 20: Do Not Commit to Anyone.” Greene summarises it like this:
“Do not commit to anyone except yourself. By maintaining your independence, you remain in control – others will vie for your attention, and you can play one side against another.”
“Law 20” is divided into two sub-laws:
- Be Courted by Everyone
- Stay Above the Fray
While I have no interest in being courted by everyone (too much work), the latter sub-law – stay above the fray – is much more interesting to me.
“Don’t let people drag you into their petty fights and squabbles,” Greene says. “Seem interested and supportive, but find a way to remain neutral; let others do the fighting while you stand back. When they tire, they’ll be ripe for the picking. Do not commit to anyone.”
Take the whole “ripe for the picking” thing with a grain of salt, because it’s not really the point. Greene’s books make for a great combination of storytelling and historical example, and I would interpret staying above the fray as not giving time to all the existential chaos that’s going on around onself and getting drawn into bad habits or other people’s dramas.
Epictetus puts it very eloquently:
“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled – have you no shame in that?”
Not that all pressure is necessarily evil in and of itself. In The Essential Wooden, American basketball coach John Wooden discusses “productive pressure:”
“I never pressured our players to win a game. I pressured them to work exceedingly hard to reach their own level of competency, but I never put any pressure on them to beat a particular opponent. … This philosophy eliminates pressure except for the pressure you put on yourself to think intelligently and work very hard to improve your skills and performance.”
That is productive pressure, or the opposite of the “smothering” distress that Bennington rails against in “Numb.” Shutting out the white noise, doing away with the external pressures of the group, and focusing on something more natural and motivating. Or, just being the best version of oneself.
Stay above the fray.
Lawrence Deveney 