Chin Up

The idea of the stiff upper lip is often held up for ridicule as a relic of an emotionally buttoned up past.

But maybe we have been too quick to discard this approach to life.

When it comes to a choice between the stiff upper lip and the emotional incontinence that is now all too common, I prefer the former as an attitude.

Some claim that the death of Princess Diana was the watershed moment. Instead of responding with grace - resigned to the fact that terrible things will sometimes happen – there were hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets pouring out their supposed grief over someone they didn’t know.

We have now become a society where people are endlessly encouraged to talk about their feelings – to ‘let it all out’. Unfortunately it seems that the more we talk about how we feel, the more we want to talk about how we feel, so that we end up treating everyday problems as cause for counselling, rather than as a problem to be shrugged off.

While I would be the first to encourage people to engage with their emotions and rational decision making I think this can be taken too far. We could take some advice from the Stoics, who argued that the key to happiness lay in accepting the world as it is rather than wishing it to be otherwise. As Epictetus said: “We must make the best of what is under our control, and take the rest as its nature is.”