Stoicism for People Pleasers

How hard should we try to make other people happy?

Stoicism is often thought of as a “tough” philosophy for “tough” people—and this is understandable, since it encourages us to be brave and resilient. It can be very useful in situations calling for physical courage, pain tolerance, and various sorts of deprivation.

But personally, I’ve always thought Stoicism is the best philosophy for sensitive and tender-hearted people. (See my article Marcus Aurelius for Sensitive Stoics for more on this.) Sensitivity manifests itself in many different ways, but one of the most difficult is the tendency to want to everyone to be happy—and to take responsibility yourself for making others happy. Like many personality traits, this one has an evolutionary basis in our social nature and the importance of relationships for human survival. But being relentlessly attuned to the inner thoughts, needs, and emotions of other people comes at a price. The desire to make other people happy can be exploited and turned against us, leaving sensitive people vulnerable to the predations of the less scrupulous. Or, more often, empathic people simply take on the emotions and burdens of the people around them, or fall victim to worries about all the terrible things happening in the world. (There is never a shortage of people and things to worry about.)

This is where Stoicism can be very valuable for people pleasers and sensitive souls. It helps us think through our social relationships and moral obligations clearly but flexibly, helping us to distinguish between what is up to us and what is not, between what we owe to others and what we owe to ourselves. So today let’s look at how Stoicism can help us harness the power of caring about others without falling into an endless trap of people pleasing or becoming hostages of our own empathy. I’ve included a summary of key points at the end, so if you’re pressed for time feel free to skip ahead for a brief overview.

Is People Pleasing Bad?

The term “people pleasing” is quite trendy in the pop psychology of the 21^st century. You can find a slew of books and articles on it, most of which assume that people pleasing is a disorder that needs to be fixed. These articles list symptoms like an inability to say no to others, sacrificing one’s own needs for other people, and seeking approval and validation by being nice or doing things for others. They locate the source of this tendency in low self-worth, fear of rejection or punishment, and a pathological need to be liked.

I see things a bit differently. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the desire to please others—to consider their feelings and want to make them happy—is a bad thing, in most cases. What would you call someone who doesn’t want to make other people happy, who doesn’t care about their feelings? That person would be a sociopath. Most people feel good about making others happy, especially those close to them and whom they care about. I think that’s basic human nature, and I can’t imagine a world in which no one wanted to please other people at all.

So the problem with people pleasing occurs when someone is trying to please others in a way that harms their own wellbeing or character. You might think of the person who is so infatuated with their romantic partner that they would be willing to rob a bank for them, or the teenager who is so desperate for peer approval that they change their entire personality to fit in. This need for another person’s approval or a complete loss of the self is certainly pathological and needs to be corrected. So if this is what we mean by “people pleasing,” then it’s not good.

But what about cases where making other people happy is generally considered positive and beneficial? This is true for many normal social relationships. If we had no desire to please each other, relationships would quickly sour as everyone would simply be looking out for their own needs. Cooperation would cease and society as we know it could not function. In general, the desire and corresponding actions to make other people happy are both necessary and beneficial.

However, there are limits to trying to please others. We all know it’s not actually possible for one person to make another person happy. When dealing with adults, who have full moral responsibility for their actions and emotions, each person’s happiness is ultimately up to them. (In the same way, we can’t make someone angry—their anger is up to them.) We certainly have a responsibility to treat others well, but we do not have a responsibility to make them happy. There’s a simple reason for this: no one can control another person’s emotions or mental condition. Epictetus’ dichotomy of control is quite useful to remember here. We can try to influence others in various ways, and our actions can certainly impact the external conditions of their lives, but their actual feelings are beyond our control.

For many kind and sensitive people, though, I think the question we ask ourselves is not “can I make others happy,” but rather “am I doing enough to help others be happy.” Even if we are fully aware that we can’t force someone to be happy or pleased, we want to do what we can for them. And we always want to make sure we are not at fault in the relationship—we don’t like causing other people distress, even if we recognize that sometimes they are their own source of distress.

In this case, then, the question centers around not if we can make people happy (we know we can’t) but how hard we should try to help them be happy. Of course, this is a very difficult question to answer because the answer is always: it depends. It depends on the nature of our relationship with this person (or people), our past experiences with them, and many other factors. For example, a parent taking care of a child has a very different responsibility toward the child than two adults in a relationship do toward each other. A close friend has different claims on you than a distant acquaintance.

For purposes of illustration, let’s consider the most paradigmatic of human relationships, that of parent and child. Caregivers have a huge responsibility to care about and work toward their child’s happiness. They are expected and required to sacrifice some of their own comfort, peace of mind, and energy (and money!) for their children. But that doesn’t mean parents always will make their child happy. Sometimes they have to set rules or boundaries—for the ultimate good of the child and the family—which make the child very unhappy. (In my house it’s making my 10-year-old brush his teeth every day.) In this case the concern is for the child’s long-term wellbeing rather than on pleasing the child in the short term. A parent who only cares about the child’s short-term satisfaction will probably make decisions that are very bad for the child in the long run. If I give in and let my son never brush his teeth, he would be very happy in the short term, but all his teeth would eventually rot out. His focus is on momentary impulse satisfaction, whereas my focus is on his long-term wellbeing.

In this case we can clearly see there is a conflict between pleasing someone I love and doing the right thing. To me, this is the crux of the issue with people pleasing: our natural desire to make others happy is a good thing until it conflicts with other moral obligations. If my desire to make my son happy in the moment leads me to ignore my larger obligation to care for his long-term wellbeing, then people pleasing has become a problem. When making decisions, I need to account for a variety of factors; his momentary happiness might be one of those factors, but there may be others that are more important.

So I would say people pleasing primarily becomes a problem when someone focuses on making others happy to the exclusion of all else, ignoring other considerations that should take precedence. In this case, the desire to please has led to warped judgment, potentially leading to harm for self or others. If a person is basing their decisions and actions primarily on the desire to please others, rather than on their principles or values, they have succumbed to a pathological form of people pleasing. Even worse is if they change their principles and values to win someone else’s approval.

But social dynamics are fluid, and we all influence and please (or displease) people all the time. How do we determine when it’s good to try to make someone happy, and when it’s better not to try? To me this is a very tricky call because making small sacrifices for other people is de rigeur in our social lives. A friend asks us to help paint their new home, and of course we go to help them out; we wait patiently and smile at the person taking forever in the checkout line ahead of us, even though we’re running late; we take a day off work to visit a sick family member, even if it means a loss of income for that day. These small acts of generosity are the social grease that make society run. I think labelling these small kindnesses as undesirable people pleasing severely diminishes the important role such acts play in our world. If people only looked out for themselves and stopped helping each other…well, society would be a different and much worse place.

But what if a friend asks you to support a political cause you don’t believe in? What if a colleague tries to undermine your projects at work? What if your significant other is not pulling their weight in the relationship? Here we have to decide where the boundary is between being cooperative and being a doormat. If the desire to make others happy leads us to give up too much of ourselves, then people pleasing has crossed a line into unhealthy territory. While it is nice to be nice, it’s not good in any sense to allow yourself to be controlled or manipulated by others. There is nothing virtuous about allowing other people to take advantage of you.

So let’s now see what Stoicism can offer to people who might struggle with the dilemmas outlined here.

Stoic Theory on Social Relations

Much of Stoic theory on social relations comes down to oikeiōsis, the ancient Stoic concept of psychological, moral, and social growth across the human lifespan. This is a somewhat technical concept that is not easily summarized, but I’ll try to put it very briefly for our purposes today. (If you’d like to dive deeper into oikeiosis, you might like to check out Stoic Ethics: The Basics.)

Basically, every child who is born possesses latent capabilities for full human rationality and sociability. (We can modify this to exclude people with certain genetic conditions that might prevent them from developing these full capacities.) At first, children are oriented toward merely staying alive and doing things that might bring immediate pleasure, like eating candy and playing video games. Later, growing toward adulthood, they might come to value conventional “goods” like popularity, money, and other external markers of social status. But ultimately, those who develop properly will come to understand that the good life—the best life for a fully developed human—is found by living in accordance with nature and virtue. Rather than trying to selfishly acquire pleasures for themselves at the expense of other people, the fully actualized person will make appropriate choices with indifferents while pursuing wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage.

Of course, not everyone finds the path toward wisdom and contentment. Due to certain confounding factors—negative social influences and a lack of awareness—some people take a wrong turn and do not fully develop their capacity for social affection or ordered reasoning. Unfortunately, this may lead them to remain self-centered and unreasonable. The unhappy result is that these people are not able to flourish and live good, happy lives. They may act selfishly or thoughtlessly, failing to care appropriately for other people.

For many people in the world, therefore, developing social wisdom means being more cooperative and considerate towards everyone else: being attentive to other people’s needs and feelings, building social harmony, being less aggressive, more helpful, more generous, more compassionate, and so forth. This is what the famous concentric circles of Hierocles are trying to help us do: pull people in closer to our field of awareness and concern, so that we genuinely care about them and treat them well.

But for empaths and people pleasers, social oikeiosis requires something different. People pleasers are already far too aware of other people’s feelings and are extremely thoughtful, helpful, and attuned to social harmony—to the point that they may be compromising themselves or allowing themselves to be taken advantage of. So for someone who loves to make others happy, social wisdom involves not giving more but giving wisely, not cooperating more but cooperating appropriately. In order not to be trampled on by people around them, the people pleaser must learn to carefully gauge when it’s appropriate to please others and when it’s appropriate to say no.

Discernment is essential here. We need to think carefully about what is fitting given our social roles and commitments. In rare cases it may be appropriate to completely sacrifice ourselves like the Giving Tree—for example, when a parent gives their own life for their child—but the times we are called to do this are thankfully rare. In other cases it may be prudent to completely cut off someone we have previously been connected to, like an abusive ex-partner. But most situations, of course, will fall somewhere in between these two extremes. It’s a question of deciding how much of ourselves we are required to give for the happiness of a particular person in a particular situation.

In Stoicism, appropriate action is actually a technical term (kathēkonta). It’s based on knowledge of what is important in life and skill in applying that knowledge to specific situations. A sage has infallible judgment and always makes the right decisions, but the rest of us just do the best we can based on our imperfect understanding of the world. Thoughtful study of philosophical principles gives us a good basis for making these decisions; for example, we know want to behave justly and encourage others to do so. But the specific ways in which we embody and apply these principles cannot be exactly prescribed, simply because the specifics change in every situation. Just to give one frequently-cited example, it might be virtuous and appropriate to tell the truth most of the time, but in a few situations it’s better not to (white lies and social graces, for example—or not revealing the truth to a would-be murderer). We have to think about our principles alongside a variety of contextual factors and decide what is most important in this situation. Sometimes social harmony or maintaining a good relationship may take precedence, while at other times it’s far more important to tell the truth.

For the people pleaser, who is naturally oriented toward making others happy, keeping principles in mind is crucial. Without principles, you could naturally find yourself being blown this way and that by the whims or unconsidered desires of those around you. If you were surrounded by sages, it would make sense to try to please them, since they would always consider the big picture—the common good and the needs of everyone—and would ask you to behave virtuously. But since sages are a bit thin on the ground, it’s far more likely that the people asking you to do things will be focused on their own personal desires rather than on anyone else’s. While we don’t necessarily know other people’s motivations, we can predict what the impact of their actions will be. So we need to use our own good judgment to determine whether pleasing a particular person will result in a net benefit, or whether it will in fact be detrimental to yourself, someone else, society, or the natural world.

If you determine that you shouldn’t try to please someone, next comes the hardest part for the people pleaser: standing up for yourself. How you do this again depends on the situation, your relationship with the person, the personalities and character of the people involved, and other situational considerations. If you have a close relationship and you trust the other person, talking to them directly is usually the best approach. At other times a complete separation from the uncooperative person may be the best course of action, or perhaps enlisting a third party (a neutral friend or even a professional counselor) to help moderate.

The important thing is that you don’t continue giving in to the other person simply because they are difficult or demanding. Self-absorbed people will continue to take advantage of your kindness as long as you let them. Justice is not served if you allow unsympathetic others to dictate your priorities, goals, or sense of being a good person. Which leads us to another consideration: how does people pleasing relate to Stoic ideals of justice?

People Pleasing and Justice

Keep in mind that when we talk about justice in Stoicism, we’re talking about how people treat each other in a broad sense, not just issues that could be heard in a court of law. (See my 2024 post on Stoic justice for more details.) The Stoic definition of justice, according to the account in Stobaeus, is “knowledge of the distribution of proper value to each person.” The qualities of a just person include good-heartedness (knowledge which does good to others), public-spiritedness (knowledge of fairness in a community), and fair dealing (knowledge of how to deal with one’s neighbors blamelessly).

This definition of justice can be applied at many different levels (nation-state, local community, family, etc.), but for now we are thinking about how it applies in the life of one individual person, the people pleaser. An individual has a finite amount of resources (attention, energy, financial support, etc.) to distribute to others. If we are bending over backward trying to please one person, we are necessarily distributing a lot of our resources to them. We need to think carefully about whether that person really deserves to have all or most of our resources. In some cases—a parent taking care of a young child—the answer may well be yes. But in others, the answer will more likely be no.

Notice this definition of justice doesn’t say anything about burning yourself out to make everyone around you happy. Instead, it emphasizes knowledge of what’s fair to each party in a situation. The knowledge required to make this decision is significant. You need to know each person’s role, relationship to each other and whether they are making a good faith effort to fulfill their own duties toward others. That’s not to say we don’t sometimes give to people who fail to live up to their responsibilities—no one is perfect, and justice doesn’t involve tit-for-tat exchanges. Sometimes the right thing is to give when we know it won’t be appreciated or returned. But good judgment means reflecting objectively on our commitments over the long term. If you continuously deplete your own resources, you will soon have nothing left to give. If you are trying too hard to please someone who doesn’t necessarily deserve it, then you have less to give others who may be equally or more deserving of your attention.

What about the role of compassion and kindness, which we often invoke when talking about social relations? I would say compassion means trying to understand other people and treating them respectfully, even when they mess up. Kindness means helping those who need to be helped, even when it’s perhaps not expected or required. But justice, kindness, and compassion do not require you to give your very self away to another person, to compromise your principles for the sake of making someone else’s life easier. In fact, justice requires the opposite: that you step back from the immediate task of pleasing someone else to think about whether your personal resources are being distributed fairly. Pulling back your time and energy—especially from someone who isn’t entitled to more of it—doesn’t mean you are withdrawing compassion. You can be kind and compassionate while still preserving your own dignity, holding others accountable for their actions, and acting with wisdom.

Kind people often feel guilty about displeasing someone or letting them down—subconsciously, we may feel that we’re not good people if we act in a way that makes someone sad or mad. If you feel responsible for someone else’s emotions, you might also see it as your responsibility to placate them (even if you have done nothing wrong). However, in such a case the kind person is doing a grave injustice to themselves. As we discussed above, one person cannot be responsible for another person’s emotions; we can only be responsible for acting with justice, which means being good-hearted, public-spirited, and dealing with others fairly. If we do these things to the best of our ability—based on our principles, social roles, and other contextual factors—we are acting appropriately, regardless of how the other person feels.

People pleasers may feel a natural and instinctive desire for other people’s happiness, but we cannot let that become a moral imperative. Our moral responsibility is to act according to nature, which means acting appropriately, developing our natural affection, caring about others, treating them with fairness and respect, applying wisdom in our social interactions, considering our social roles and the common good. It does not mean breaking ourselves down to cater to the whims of other people or comply with their moods and demands. When there is a moral conflict between making someone else happy and doing the right thing, we always choose to act with justice.

Summary

I hope you’ve found something of value in this reflection on people pleasing. By way of conclusion, here’s a brief recap of major points we’ve covered.

The desire to make other people happy is not a bad thing, but it can become a problem when someone gives up too much of themselves to please another person (or people).

It’s not possible for one person to make someone else happy. No one controls another person’s emotions, though of course we can try to influence each other. Every adult is responsible for their own decisions, emotions, and actions.

People pleasers, who have a natural desire to make others happy, should carefully consider their roles and relationships to the person they are trying to please. Only in rare contexts (e.g., saving a family member’s life) would it be reasonable to completely sacrifice yourself for another person.

When deciding how much to help someone be happy, it’s crucial for people pleasers to rely on well-defined principles and values. These will serve as an objective guide for determining what is just toward self and others.

Justice involves the fair distribution of resources. If we devote too much of our energy, emotion, etc., to those who are not properly receptive, we deplete ourselves and also have less to give to others who might benefit more. For people pleasers, developing social wisdom means learning how to wisely and appropriately give away their time, attention, and other personal resources.

Kindness, compassion, and justice do not require one person to solve everyone else’s problems for them or take on everyone else’s emotional pain. These ideals help us to treat others with understanding and respect, but they do not require us to give our very selves away.

People pleasers cannot allow themselves to feel guilty for other people’s unhappiness or feel responsible for placating unreasonable others. Keep your focus on what is up to you, which is acting with wisdom and justice.

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