How Stoics Handle People Who Drain Their Energy
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"People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them." — Epictetus, Enchiridion
I was stuck at Poznań Airport (Poland) yesterday, waiting for a flight to London that refused to leave on schedule. The terminal wasn't crowded — if anything, it had the strange, echoing calm of a room built for motion that has, for the moment, forgotten what it's for. I found a table near the coffee stand, set my bag on the empty chair across from me, and watched the departure board cycle through its quiet update: Delayed, next to Stansted.
I wanted to read the word as kind — as if the universe had pressed pause not to punish me but to hand me something. It's a pleasant thought, and it isn't true. A board does not know I exist. A delay is not mercy; it's arithmetic — a late crew, a queue on a runway I'll never see. It has no opinion of me. It doesn't care whether I use the hour or waste it.
That indifference turned out to be the more useful lesson. The delay itself was nothing. What I did inside it was everything.
Watching the Terminal
Once I stopped resenting the wait, I started watching the room, and a terminal at a standstill is an unusually honest place. A man paced a fixed loop between two pillars, checking his phone every few steps, visibly spending some reserve of patience he didn't have to spare. A woman spoke into her phone in a low, tight voice, each sentence landing heavier than the last. Two people sat close together, arguing without raising their voices — which is somehow worse, because it meant they'd had this argument before and knew exactly where the soft places were.
And then there were the others. A man reading, his coffee cooling beside him, unbothered by the board. A woman with her eyes closed, not asleep, just elsewhere.
The flight was equally late for everyone. The only variable was what each person was willing to hand over to it.
The Theft We Allow
We're taught to guard our time — to resent the meeting that runs long, the flight that sits on the tarmac. But sitting there, I realized time is rarely the real theft. It's the coin we notice going missing, while something quieter empties out beside it: attention, equilibrium, the particular clarity of a mind that hasn't yet been asked to defend itself against anyone.
Some people do to your composure what a delay does to your itinerary. Not through cruelty, usually — through gravity. A friend's unending crisis. A colleague who needs an audience more than a conversation. A relative who mistakes your calm for a resource to be spent. None of them are villains. They are weather systems, and weather doesn't apologize for arriving.
The Stoics never asked whether such people were bad. They asked a smaller, harder question: is this mine to carry?
"Some things are in our control and others not." — Epictetus, Enchiridion
Our peace belongs only in the first category. Everything else is borrowed weather, passing through.
Quiet Boundaries
A real boundary, I've noticed, makes almost no noise. It isn't a wall thrown up in anger. It's closer to what I did with my bag on that chair — a small, unspoken claim on a space, made without asking anyone's permission and defended without raising my voice.
I can't continue this conversation right now. I need this hour to be mine. I won't be the audience for this today.
No drama in any of it. No apology, either. A door, not a wall — you simply decide, quietly, who is let through.
The Long View
A single bad hour tells you almost nothing. A pattern tells you everything. The man pacing between the pillars will land in London tonight, and the delay will be forgotten by Friday. But the friend who is always the crisis, the colleague who is always the storm — that isn't weather anymore. That's climate. And climate is the one thing worth planning around.
"Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested." — Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
Seneca wasn't talking about calendars. He meant attention — the only currency that doesn't renew itself simply because you wish it would.
Returning to Yourself
Eventually the board changed. Boarding, it said, as though the hour hadn't existed at all. I gathered my bag from the chair where it had been keeping my small, ordinary boundary, and walked toward the gate a little lighter than when I'd sat down — not because the flight had improved, but because I had spent the delay on myself instead of lending it, unasked, to everyone around me.
A stoic practice for the next drain on your energy: before you spend another minute on frustration, ask Epictetus's question — is this within my power? If it isn't, let it pass like weather. If your peace is what's actually at stake, guard it the way you'd guard anything you couldn't easily replace: not with anger, but with quiet, unnegotiable clarity about whose it is.
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All quotes are taken from public-domain editions or translations of the original Stoic texts.
Thank you for reading.
If this piece spoke to you, you may enjoy my other Stoic essays — reflections on courage, calm, and the quiet work of becoming who we are meant to be.
For more writing, visit the archive or join me on YouTube, where I share short Stoic lessons in a calm, minimalist style.
Strength grows in silence. Clarity grows in practice.
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