A Stoic’s Guide To Not Being Annoying: 8 Steps Even You Could Follow

The Stoics had a lot to say about virtue, death, and the indifferent churn of the cosmos. What they did not have, as far as we know, was a coworker who reheats fish in the communal microwave at 11:40 a.m.

This is a shame, because Stoicism turns out to be a shockingly good operating manual for the single most achievable form of self-improvement available to a human being: being slightly less irritating to the people around you.

Marcus Aurelius ran an empire while being stabbed in the back by roughly everyone. You can survive a group chat.

What follows are eight steps, drawn from genuine Stoic philosophy and applied to the genuine problem of you. No toga required.

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1. Accept That Most Things Are None of Your Business

Epictetus opened his entire philosophy with one brutal sorting exercise, the famous “dichotomy of control”: some things are up to us, and some things are not.

Your opinions are up to you. The weather, the referee’s call, and your sister-in-law’s parenting choices are not.

The annoying person is the one who has never once performed this sort, and who therefore treats a stranger’s grocery-bagging technique as a personal affront requiring immediate correction.

Epictetus would gently suggest that the bread goes wherever the bread goes, and that you have no jurisdiction here.

Example: You are at a four-way stop. Another driver waves you through out of turn, violating the ancient sacred order of arrival. The non-Stoic spends the next nine minutes narrating this injustice to a passenger, a dog, and eventually a podcast. The Stoic simply drives. The Stoic is already three blocks away, at peace, listening to nothing.

2. Practice the Pause Before You “Well, Actually”

Seneca warned that we are tossed about by every impulse, reacting before we have had a chance to consider whether reacting is wise. Nowhere is this more visible than in the half-second between someone making a small factual error and you correcting it. That half-second is the whole ballgame.

Seneca would have you insert a pause there—not a long one, just long enough to ask the question that has saved more friendships than any other: does anyone actually need to know this?

Example: Your friend says a tomato is a vegetable. It is, botanically, a fruit. You know this. Everyone knows you know this, because you tell them roughly every six weeks. Seneca invites you to hold the fact inside your mouth like a warm stone and let it cool there, unspoken, while the salad is enjoyed by all.

3. Remember That You, Too, Are Frequently the Problem

Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations mostly to remind himself, daily, that he was not the protagonist of the universe and that the irritating people he met were, from their own point of view, just trying to get through Tuesday.

The genuinely Stoic move is to extend this to yourself in the other direction: somewhere out there, you are the slow walker. You are the loud chewer. You are the one who replied-all. Humility is just accurate accounting.

Example: You complain about people who take phone calls on speaker in public. Fair. But you also hum. You hum constantly, tunelessly, a private soundtrack you are not aware of producing. Three separate people have learned to identify your approach by the humming. To them, you are the speaker phone. Marcus would want you to know this, kindly.

4. Stop Performing Your Own Suffering

The Stoics distinguished between pain and the elaborate theater we build around pain. A thing happens; then we add the sighing, the trailing-off sentences, the “no, it’s fine,” delivered in a tone that makes it clear it is not fine and that fixing it is now your audience’s full-time job.

Epictetus held that we are disturbed not by events but by our judgments about them—and, he might add, by our performances of those judgments for a captive household.

Example: You are tired. We are all tired. The annoying version announces the tiredness every twenty minutes like a railway station updating a delayed train. The Stoic version goes to bed. Revolutionary. Unbeatable. Nobody has to hear about it.

5. Let Other People Be Wrong in Peace

Marcus Aurelius reminded himself each morning that he would meet people who were meddling, ungrateful, and arrogant—and that his job was not to fix them but to not become them.

The annoying person treats every disagreement as a hostage situation that ends only when the other party fully recants. The Stoic understands that a person who is wrong about which highway is faster will be wrong about it whether or not you produce a map. You may simply allow it. The highway will sort them out.

Example: At dinner, someone confidently misremembers which actor was in which film. You have the correct answer, the year, and the director’s full name loaded and ready. Marcus would have you set the weapon down. The movie was fine. Nobody is being graded. The night continues without your director’s commentary.

6. Want Less, Talk About Wanting Less Even Less

A central Stoic practice is wanting less—training yourself to be content with what is, rather than restless for what is next. There is, however, an annoying counterfeit version, in which a person wants less very loudly and at great length, narrating their minimalism, their digital detox, and their decision to “just unplug” until everyone present wishes they would plug back in.

Seneca valued the quiet kind. Tranquility, he noted, does not require an announcement.

Example: The Stoic deleted the app. The annoying person deleted the app, told you they deleted the app, explained why you should delete the app, and then asked to borrow your phone to look something up.

7. Treat Your Reactions as a Choice, Not a Weather Event

The foundational Stoic insight is that the space between what happens and how you respond is yours to govern.

The annoying person rejects this entirely, presenting their every outburst as an involuntary natural phenomenon: “That’s just how I am,” “I tell it like it is,” “I can’t help it.”

Epictetus would point out that this is not a personality—it is a thermostat with no one home. You can, in fact, help it. That is the entire promise of the philosophy, and frankly its best selling point.

Example: Someone takes the parking spot you were clearly waiting for. The weather-event person becomes weather. The Stoic notices the flash of rage, observes it the way you’d observe a passing cloud, and then parks eleven feet farther away, arriving at the store with their dignity and their afternoon fully intact.

8. Remember You Will Die, and So Will the Argument You’re Winning

The Stoics kept death close on purpose—memento mori, the daily reminder that your time is finite and most of what agitates you will not matter by Thursday, let alone by the heat death of the universe.

This is not meant to be grim. It is meant to be enormously, hilariously freeing.

The thread you are about to spend forty minutes replying to will outlive neither of you. The cosmos is indifferent to who had the last word, and the cosmos has excellent taste.

Example: You are drafting the reply. It is a good reply. It has receipts. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, master of the known world, dead now for around 1,845 years, would look at your phone, look at you, and ask the only question that has ever mattered: is this how you want to spend one of the few thousand Tuesdays you get? Then he would put the phone face-down. Then he would go for a walk.

The Final Step Is No Step

If there is a unifying thread here, it is that not being annoying is rarely about doing more. It is almost always about doing less: correcting less, performing less, narrating less, needing the last word less.

The Stoics built an entire system of self-mastery and then spent most of it learning to leave things alone.

You can start smaller. You can start with the microwave fish. Marcus believes in you, which is more than he could say for most of the Roman Senate.

Mike Primavera

Mike Primavera is a Chicago-based writer specializing in everything from humor to philosophy. Follow him on all social media at @primawesome