I have never understood people who get so wound up about things they cannot control.
I say that fully aware that I was exactly that person in my 20s back in the 1970s. I held myself and everyone around me to standards so impossibly high that frustration was basically my default setting. Someone finally told me I was making myself miserable and dragging others along with me.
They were right.
People liked me just fine, but I was burning emotional fuel like a rocket launch. Every minor failing, every imperfection, every deviation from how I thought things should be felt like an emergency. I mostly kept it to myself, but my discomfort wasn't 100% secret.
It took years to understand the truth behind what is now circulating as the Let Them Theory (audiobook).
And here is the funny part.
There is nothing new about it. Let Them is simply the latest name on wisdom that has been passed down for thousands of years under different labels.
The Let Them Theory is simple.
If people are going to do something that disappoints you, frustrates you, or runs against your expectations, let them. Let people show you who they are. Let their choices be theirs, not your burden. Do not try to correct, control, rescue, or manage what is not yours to manage. Adjust your boundaries and keep your peace.
Let Them does not mean letting people harm you or anyone else. It applies to the small things, the personal expectations, the disappointments, the ego bruises, the dramas that are not yours to carry.
But when someone’s actions cross into real harm, abuse, exploitation, or danger, you do not let them. You step in. You act. You set hard boundaries. You protect yourself and others. Let Them is wisdom for everyday frustrations, not a replacement for courage when action is required.
The Let Them Theory’s closest modern ancestor is the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr. Accept what you cannot change. Change what you can. Know the difference. That is the Let Them idea distilled.
Long before that, the Stoics were in on it. Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus. Seneca. Control what is yours. Release everything that is not.
Shift over to Asia and you find Taoism with wu wei, the art of non-forcing. Do not push the river. Let it flow.
Then Buddhism, with its teachings on impermanence and non-attachment. Stop gripping what is already slipping away.
Move forward in time and you hit the moral maxim Live and let live. The Polish gave us Not my circus, not my monkeys. Recovery communities taught Detach with love. Bowen Family Systems Theory taught emotional boundaries and self-differentiation. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy repeated it all again in modern psychological language.
Different centuries, different cultures, one message.
Stop trying to control what is not yours to control.
By the time I hit my 20s, this thinking already made sense to me, even if I did not know the names yet. I had years of Okinawan Ishinryu Karate behind me from grade school and junior high in the 1960s. Later beginning in college I studied Aikido, ending up later in life on the Board of Directors of a local 501(c)(3) non-profit Aikido school and those principles fit the same shape.
When I found Buddhism, the pieces aligned even more. When I earned my psychology degree, it closed the circle. All of it blended naturally. I was raised Catholic, old school Slovak Catholic. I was amazing how well one things merged into the other for me. From Catholicism, to Karate, to Buddhism, to psychological theory.
Looking back, what still amazes me is how naturally one thing in my life merged into the next. Catholicism had given me discipline and ritual. Karate arrived and taught me balance, breath, and the idea that strength is not domination but control of self. Buddhism followed and showed me that letting go is not weakness but clarity. Then psychological theory put names and structures to everything I had already felt in my bones.
None of these contradicted each other. They overlapped like layers of the same teaching spoken in different languages.
Catholicism gave me conscience.
Karate gave me focus.
Buddhism gave me equanimity.
Psychology gave me the framework.
And all of them pointed toward the same truth some now call the Let Them Theory.
Martial arts, Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, psychology.
Different languages, same truth.
Let go of what is not yours.
Hold only what is.
Which brings us back to today.
The next version of the Let Them Theory you will hear is something like this:
Sure, but sometimes you just have to punch them in the mouth.
And that is very much 2020s America. The pendulum swings wildly. Everything becomes binary. Anger becomes identity. We see it with MaGA, lending elements of fascism and authoritarianism into the latest flavor of what has become toxic conservatism that thrives on the adrenaline of outrage.
They feed themselves on the idea of Do not you dare let them. Control everything. Crush anything that feels different.
And then the natural reaction becomes:
Same back atcha, pal.
But here is the truth. You do not have to participate in that juvenile cycle. You can say:
Sure. But do not.
Do not swing back.
Do not drop to that level.
Do not make someone else’s chaos your compass.
Let them reveal themselves.
Let them burn their own energy.
Let them have their tantrums, their conspiracies, their performative outrage.
And you?
You keep your peace.
You keep your standards, the healthy ones this time, for yourself and not as weapons for others.
That is the real Let Them Theory.
Not passivity.
Not weakness.
Simply the choice to stop letting someone else’s dysfunction take up space in your mind.
A Final Note
I have of late been ending my blogs with Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
I've be using "Cheers" for some years now, a couple of decades in emails.
I started using "Sláinte!' As I learned more about that side of my family history. And realizing I was leaning into my Celtic side more than what I am mostly made of, according to DNA, my Slovak side,
I recently added Na zdravie! In that way I've been paying homage to my own sensibilities, as well as both of my parents on what was once considered my Czechoslovakia side (my mom's family), and my Irish side (my dad's family).
Czechoslovakia, by the way, was a Central European country that existed from 1918 to 1992 and was dissolved into two separate nations: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. So, I just use Slovak, now.
As for Cheers! I just liked it. I’ve used it for decades. Then, Sláinte entered my life, and rather than replace one with the other, they blended together, inclusively. And so, with my recent realization of Na zdravie! It just fit in along with the others.
Those three words tie directly into this entire idea. Each one is a simple wish for goodwill and health, spoken in three different languages from my own heritage. A small closing reminder that connection matters more than control. A way to end on something human and generous, even when the topic is how to let go of those who are not.
And so?
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