| From the age of 29 to 44, he didn't cry—not when he got divorced, not even when his mother passed away. Like so many men, he had internalized that crying was a failure of masculinity, a sign of weakness. He was acting like a lower-case stoic. But then, as Scott Galloway told us on one of our most popular episodes of the Daily Stoic podcast, something changed. At some point, he realized that tears aren't a sign of weakness. It's striking that of the few surviving stories about Marcus Aurelius, almost all of them involve him crying. When his favorite tutor passed away, to give one example, we're told that Marcus was bereft with grief. As people tried to calm him down, to remind him of the need for a prince to maintain his composure, Antoninus, Marcus's stepfather, told them to let the boy cry. "Neither philosophy nor empire," Antoninus said, "takes away natural feeling." On the podcast (a must listen!), Galloway told a beautiful story of when helping his son pack for boarding school, he was hit by that sense of loss parents feel as children grow older and begin to leave the nest. Overwhelmed by emotion, he left the room for a moment. "But then," Galloway said in our interview, "I think, 'well I need to go back into the room to show him that it's okay to cry.' It's not only cathartic, but it informs what's important to you." Tears are not a sign that you are weak, but that you care. Nobody said a Stoic is care-free. Never feeling sadness or loss or love, means, as Galloway put it, "you're just sort of sleepwalking through life, as I was from 29 through 44…[We] really need to get over this bullshit notion that masculinity is not showing your emotions. It is so important, and not only that, it's just so rewarding to cry." No matter how much philosophy you've read. No matter how much older you've gotten or how important your position or how many eyes are on you…it doesn't take away natural feeling.
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