I find classic Stoicism interesting, but these modern social media and influencer versions of Stoicism feel like something else entirely.
The heading and subheading of this article invoke ideas of indifference and warriors and prisoners. This appeals to frustrated people, more often men, who are struggling with emotional regulation and want a solution that feels like a tough response.
Maybe there’s something useful in here, but more often than not when I see younger people I work with invoke stoicism it’s as a weak defensive mechanism to dodge their emotions for a while rather than deal with them. The modern simplified ideal of stoicism is just being too tough to care and flexing to show others that you don’t care.
Anecdotally, I haven’t seen anyone embrace this social media version of stoicism and thrive on it long term. At best it’s just a phase that helps them get past something temporary, but at worst it’s a misleading ideal that leads them to bottling up and ignoring problems until they become too unbearable to ignore. Some times you do have to care and you have to address the root cause, not just listen to some influencers telling you to be so tough you don’t care like legions of warriors and prisoners in past literature.
Proper Stoicism is not about dodging your emotions, it's very much about dodging the adverse behavioral effects of your emotions. You're encouraged to work through your emotions proactively and in depth (the Stoics encouraged askesis which literally means 'training' or 'exercise') so that they don't adversely affect you and others down the road. Of course, you should also learn how to counter these effects in the moment, which often involves temporarily repressing and "bottling up" disagreeable emotions, such as anger. But there's really no expectation in the sources that this will suffice long term.
> Proper Stoicism is not about dodging your emotions, it's very much about dodging the adverse behavioral effects of your emotions.
I’m not disagreeing with this. I understand classic stoicism, but I’ve also seen the effects of modern pseudo-stoicism as pushed by influencers and social media.
Focusing on stoicism and trying to dodge the effects of your emotions is a reasonable strategy for someone who is truly stuck in a situation, like the prisoners or warriors cited in the article.
But it becomes a self-defeating action when the situation you’re dealing with is something that should be addressed or changed rather than dealing with it like you’re a prisoner and helpless victim. The common example is someone in a toxic job who is furiously consuming stoicism social media and trying to act stoic in the face of a job they hate instead of using that energy to apply for another job.
ISTM that improving one's emotional self-regulation is an excellent first-line response to being in what seems to be a toxic job. It may be that leaving that job and applying for another is still the right thing to do, all things considered, but we cannot know for sure unless we are in that situation ourselves and can de-stress enough to do a proper evaluation of it.
I agree that improving emotional regulation is a first step to building up the energy to change a situation.
My issue with modern internet style pseudo-stoicism is that it's fixated on becoming indifferent (the title of this article, even) and breeds a sort of learned helplessness. The article's sub-heading is about prisoners and warriors, but using techniques optimized for being a prisoner or stuck in a war isn't quite right for someone navigating a toxic relationship or toxic job where you're not actually entirely helpless.
Indeed, one exercise is negative visualization. Think about the worst thing that can happen in other words, simulate the feelings and mentally rehearse a measured response.
>these modern social media and influencer versions of Stoicism feel like something else entirely
Yes, the pop philosophy folks tend to confuse Stoicism with Spartanism, just like they confuse Epicureanism with Hedonism. It also helps to have a basic understanding of ancient Aretaic (Virtue) Ethics and the context in which some of these works were written (e.g., was one work or school of thought developed in response to some other one that preceded it).
As always, it's best to read the original works, and in the case of the Stoics (Epictetus, Aurelius, Seneca) they're really not difficult reads assuming a decent modern translation.
Also stay away from the manosphere influencers who peddle the weird self help stuff you allude to, whether under the guise of Stoicism or anything else.
I'm not even sure you've nailed "classic" stoicism. More than a few stoics have related stoicism to normalizing your reaction to something that happens to you as if it happened to someone else. It implies maintaining a perspective that the world just does and that it's largely impersonal.
People invoke Marcus Aurelius but are not really engaged in the classical study of Greek stoicism, they read into it what they want to see. It’s a lazy justification for what you already want. Any “epiphany” that comes from that is self serving, cloaked in moralistic terms.
it's Broicism; Modern self-help for dudes that think enjoying sex is feminine and washing your bung is homoerotic. The primary consumer is unlikely to read the entirety of The Meditations and prefers short, punchy aphorisms they can memorize.
I think of the "tough warrior philosopher" messaging as the installation medium for this hack. All hacks need an attractive bait/installer.
Once the hack sets in, you start reading more b/c you identify partially as "philosopher", and you start to see more of the genuine, peaceful, forgiving side, like in Meditations. The "we are all flawed men" kind of thing.
> I think of the "tough warrior philosopher" messaging as the installation medium for this hack. All hacks need an attractive bait/installer.
The average young person who discovers stoicism via articles like this or via an influencer isn’t going to do a deep dive into classic literature as the next step.
They’re going to seek out more influencer slop that delivers more of what drew them to it: The prisoner/warrior bait about being so tough that you don’t care about anything.
The average young person probably does nothing at all. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Some percentage of people will come to Stoicism via an influencer and continue to dig.
But it's not a choice between good or perfect. The internet style stoicism becomes a sort of learned helplessness for people who skim articles and think it means you should assume everything is out of your control and instead focus on ignoring your emotions.
The contention is with "good". Is it good to have a bunch of people becoming emotionally stunted in case a handful dig further? Presumably there were people moved to stoicism prior to the current influencer trend, is that not good enough?
That depends on how much credit you give to the average person. In this climate, probably a small amount, but I think the stoics would say that we should not judge them if they're not ready to hear the msg, but be glad they heard it and hope it settles in later.
Yes, exactly what I've been thinking about. I remember a conversation I had here a few years back where a few of us were sharing how growing up on forums like 4chan had implanted in us a deep nihilism and cynicism, and how that was being mistaken for stoicism, when really it's just being emotionally stunted.
I've been thinking about this modern idea of stoicism along the same lines you've written here. Basically it seems like a lot of self help is directed towards this idea of regulating and controlling yourself, often by trying to overcome our inherent flaws as humans, which I don't necessarily disagree with. However, take for example this from the article:
> has given the name ‘negative visualisation’. By keeping the very worst that can happen in our heads constantly, the Stoics tell us, we immunise ourselves from the dangers of too much so-called ‘positive thinking’, a product of the mind that believes a realistic accounting of the world can lead only to despair. Only by envisioning the bad can we truly appreciate the good; gratitude does not arrive when we take things for granted.
This is fighting an uphill battle. Rather than work against our own psychology, it seems to me that the better thing to do is to leverage our irrationality to great affect, which is what positive thinking and self actualization does. "Fake it til you make it" genuinely does work.
I'm starting to feel like the better path to take is the one that fully acknowledges and embraces all of our sloppiness. I've been doing this with my ADHD: rather than trying to leverage system upon system to normalize my behavior, I've tried giving up on that entirely and instead focusing more on directing things like hyperfocus in productive directions. I've been trying to put aside this lie I've been telling myself that I can be some strong independent man forging his own path, and spending lots of time with people, asking people lots of questions instead of going home to read on my own. Rather than try to master my willpower when it came to weight loss, I accepted my weakness and threw away all the snacks in the house.
I think stoicism still has its place in attempting to prevent e.g. self harming behavior in response to e.g. anger or depression (blowing up on someone for example), but I feel lately like it's a pointless lie to pretend we can go through life without letting other people affect our emotions; or if not a lie, then that to try to do so cuts us off from an absolutely critical aspect of human existence.
> I think stoicism still has its place in attempting to prevent e.g. self harming behavior ...
Stoic sources actually state explicitly that Stoic ethics is all about preventing "self-harming behavior" arising from our emotions. They just have a much more expansive definition of what's "self-harming" than modern society does! Raw emotional responses are seen as mere facts of nature that cannot be meaningfully avoided and repressed, but they can still be subjected to reasonable judgment, and then accepted or critiqued. The common modern idea that Stoicism is merely about emotional repression and a totally "unemotional" stance is quite a misconception.
> The common modern idea that Stoicism is merely about emotional repression and a totally "unemotional" stance is quite a misconception.
Honestly, I blame Mr. Spock. Another thought I've been chewing on is emotional repression from a certain crowd of people who grew up as socially isolated nerds and / or autists that identified strongly with what they perceived as hyper rational characters like Spock. Sprinkle in high technology and the fact that these characters succeed at things nerds love and you get hero worship and emulation. Then add in all the masculine marketing we get from "stoic" characters like the dude from Drive to get another layer to the equation.
This is one of those rare cases where I believe young men would benefit from reading more Nietzsche.
"Do you want to live 'according to nature'? O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature - extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown - imagine this indifference itself as a power - how could you live in accordance with this indifference? Living - isn't that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn't living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?"
Nietzsche never cared about understanding of anything, he had an agenda, a mission to fulfill. His arguments are always shallow and shifty - the quote provided by throw4847285 is a good illustration of it.
With that said, my words aren't an endorsement of Stoicism, nor am I against it - I know little about it because I don't think it addresses my specific needs.
Very well put. I'd add the psychological concept of dissociation which seems to be central to the hackernews version of stoicism. Instead of connecting to your emotions it encourages pushing them down. That's just going to postpone the moment when you have to deal with them. Either because of psychosomatic illness, depression, burn out or mental breakdown. Attempting to influence, change, control feelings/emotions by rational concepts and thinking is doomed to fail. Emotions are on a lower level than verbal and logical mental processes.
What ? You don't want to read a book by a total rando about how stoicism will transform you into an alpha male in 30 days and with a gen ai cover of a Greek warrior from 300 ?
this thread seems to be filled with a lot of folks that have read and understood actual stoicism but are unaware of the fact that a "pop stoicism" exists out in the world.
this leads to a lot of people talking past each other.
As an actual prisoner in solitary confinement, the principles of stoic acceptance helped me a lot. Control is a powerful myth. It is stunning once it is taken away.
>Stoicism is, as much as anything, a philosophy of gratitude – and a gratitude, moreover, rugged enough to endure anything.
Actual stoicism is kind of darkly funny. Here's a word-for-word (translated, of course) excerpt from Epictetus:
"It's possible to understand what nature wants from situations where we're no different from other people. For example, when a slave breaks someone else's cup we're instantly ready to say 'These things happen.' So when it's a cup of yours that gets broken, appreciate that you have the same attitude as when it's someone else's cup. Transfer the principle to things of greater importance. Has someone else's child or wife died? There's no one who wouldn't say 'So it goes.' But when it's one's own child or wife who's died, the automatic response is 'Oh, no!' and 'Poor me!' It's essential to remember how we feel when we hear of this happening to others."
There are a few (darkly) funny claims in here:
- _ANYONE_ would be pretty indifferent to hear that someone's wife or child has died.
- You should feel the same about your wife or child as someone else's.
- Potentially, you should feel the same way about your wife as you do a cup.
I'm being cheeky with the last one, and I don't think there's _nothing_ to the quote above, however I cannot imagine most people being able to adopt this view, or seeing it as a view which _should_ be adopted.
I suppose some of it is also not dark at all, and is simply funny. Here's another excerpt:
"If you're informed that someone or other is speaking ill of you, don't defend yourself against the allegations, but respond by saying: "Well, he must be unaware of my other faults, otherwise these wouldn't have been the only ones he mentioned."
It's stated a bit differently, but this is effectively the exact tact taken by Eminem's competition-winning rap in 8 Mile. "These guys think I'm bad? They missed all this obvious stuff, let me lay out all my faults for you."
Reminds me of Lincoln being called "two-face" by Douglas and replying “If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?”
Self deprecation can indeed be disarming. But it must never cross the point of eliminating self respect. That's when you go from easy going to pure loser.
- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.
- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”
- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.
The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.
[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]
I find stoicism to be Taoism's spiritual sibling in the West. From the Dao De Jing, passage 5, Red Pine's translation:
"Heaven and Earth are heartless /
treating creatures like straw dogs /
heartless is the sage /
treating people like straw dogs..."
and his translation of one commentary:
"Heaven and Earth aren't partial. They don't kill living things
out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we
make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the
altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw
them into the street, but not because we hate them. This is how the sage treats
the people."
It reflects a detached, broad perspective on the world, which does not deny our very attached and narrow view, but rather augments it and provides a counterweight to our suffering.
There's some passages in the Zhuangzi (another of the 3 central ancient Taoist texts, along with the Tao Te Ching and Liehzi) that feel very analogous. I'm too lazy to find actual translations right now so bear in mind my recollection may be flawed.
There's a part where it talks any how, if you're sailing on a river and an unoccupied boat comes down the river towards you, you simply avoid it. But if that boat were occupied, you might holler at the person to get out of your way, and it might be upsetting.
There's also a passage where Zhuangzi's wife has died, and his friend find him merrily beating a drum. He asks if this is the proper way to mourn his wife. Zhuangzi replies that he had initially cried and lamented when his wife passed, until he realized that she had become what she was before she had lived, and that to everything there was a season. (There's definitely more here than I remember off the top of my head.)
Tangentially, if one has only read the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi and Liehzi are also great and worth reading. The Liehzi is very short, and the Zhuangzi can be abridged to the first 7 chapters if desired. (Chapter 17 slaps but is mostly a reiteration of chapter 1.) You could read all 3 in a weekend (if you abridge Zhuangzi).
I see it more as being about acceptance. If your wife dies, at some point, you will have to accept that your wife died and move on. This doesn't mean that you are cold or insensitive to it, it just means that you have accepted and processed this sorrow fully and are now ready to move on.
Stoicism for me is about practicing a sort of pre-acceptance of such things. To understand that everything bad that can happen eventually will happen (if you live long enough) and to accept it even before it has happened.
In more modern terms, I would call what Epictetus does here a reframing. It's used in therapy, marketing, PR and presumably other areas as well. Essentially it's saying "well, but if you look at it $this way$, it's not so bad, is it?" .
When strangers tell you that, it's very often with a malicious motivation, but it can be a helpful tool for coping with your own stuff.
This reminds me of this Buddhist story about the cup that is already broken. I think I like this a bit better, as it's not that the cup doesn't matter, but rather enjoying it for what it is while you have it.
A monk had a beautiful, delicate tea cup.
His student asked him about the cup. And much to the student's surprise he replied that the cup is already broken. “What do you mean?” – asked the student.
The monk said – “To me this cup is already broken.”
“I enjoy it. I drink from it. It holds my water admirably – sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put it on the shelf and the winds blows it over or I knock it off the table and it shatters on the ground then I say - of course.
When I understand the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
How I perceived it, Epictetus wants to say: things happen and you are on a spectrum of emotions based on the context (in case of death, how close you were to the person), try to minimize the length of the spectrum.
I agree in part. You could read Epictetus as saying "just try not caring about people," which I think is the incorrect reading. Instead, I think he's saying something like "take a step back and realize that your deep personal attachments don't look so important when you step outside your perspective. You can use this realization to help get past the deep emotional pain that is normal for people to feel."
However, the line about other's indifference I think can only be read as dark funny to a modern reader:
> has someone else's child or wife died? There's no one who wouldn't say 'So it goes.'
The world being indifferent to your pain is not helping if you're in acute pain. Step outside your perspective, sure. I guarantee you this will not work if you have real issues like physical pain due to terminal cancer.
You should read "A Man's Search for Meaning" sometime. While not exactly Stoicism many of the ideas are similar/related. How a person views and responds to their situation, has a huge impact on them. No one is saying any of this will remove all of someone's acute pain, but as crazy as it sounds, accepting that suffering can lead maybe the pain not being quite so bad.
But imagining oneself from a third perspective has a therapeutic effect that you can't really explain in words. You just do it and it's deeply soothing somehow.
As I get older, I read this entirely differently (as an appeal to empathy) than I did when I was younger (as an appeal to stolidity).
In other words, you should be pained for your neighbor when his slave breaks his cup. Maybe his grandmother left him that cup, and he's developed many fond memories around which he drank a soothing beverage in that heirloom. That empathy how we connect with people, build meaning, and make life richer.
My initial reaction was to disagree, but the man did allegedly take in an abandoned infant. And a woman to care for it[1]. And, our readings[2] of that quote (acceptance vs altruism) aren't in any way incompatible.
[1] You absolutely don't want to be a single woman in 1st century AD.
From just the quote above, I understand more as something intermediate : don't be pained when your cup is broken, like if it it was the cup of some else but be pained when someone else wife or child die, like if it was your
He was a slave at some point, right? Maybe he was just trying to get people to chill out about their cups, to save some of his former peers an unpleasant time.
It's about accepting the bad things that will inevitably happen to us. "Loving your wife" and "grieving when she dies" are two separate things. We need mental framing that does not connect them, even though our default settings are to do so. Or at least that's how I'm reading it.
> You should feel the same about your wife or child as someone else's.
I don't see why it should be so.
It makes perfect sense to sympathize(?) and understand that somebody is grieving and is likely going through pain/emotions that I would have gone through if my wife/child has died. But that is not the same thing as me feeling those emotions.
Isn't this the distinction between empathy and sympathy?
I don't see this as particularly dark or particularly funny. Seems like good advice. Most of our negative emotions are a waste of time and energy. I always try to see things in the greater context of the world: all things are brief, beautiful, and utterly without meaning in the greater scheme of things. If I spend a ton of time wailing and grinding my teeth about shit then I'm just wasting time I could be using to enjoy the experience of being alive.
> Most of our negative emotions are a waste of time and energy.
In a different frame, most of our negative emotions are there to help us - by signifying that something is wrong. You could be thankful for having them so that you are prompted to investigate what's wrong. It's only when we forget that feelings are only a part of our experience and start to identify with feelings (positive and negative) that trouble arises.
I think that’s the wrong takeaway - the point is that when it’s happening to someone else, it’s easier to see the ‘right’ attitude to take regarding misfortune.
Of course it’s awful to have your child die, but also it’s fairly commonly understood, that it can’t be the end of your life as well, you take the time you need to grieve, and then you go on living. “So it goes.”
The point with the cup is the same: it’s easier to council patience and forgiveness when your lap isn’t soaked with wine, when shards of your cup don’t litter the floor.
It’s demonstrating a route to removing yourself from the emotion of the present situation, to examine things rationally, dispassionately, like you would if they were happening to someone else, because it’s easier to see the right thing to do that way.
I think if we did the opposite, where we imagine we are the same person as other people in various situations, I think we would be overcome with debilitating pain, unable to function and just curling up into a ball and crying all day.
Some people hold this view not by choice, but by biology. In clinical terms it’s associated with psychopathy, or antisocial personality disorder if you prefer more neutral language. These individuals can perform acts that would emotionally devastate most people while experiencing little to no internal response. Importantly, the vast majority of psychopaths are not violent criminals or serial killers.
This isn’t speculative philosophy. Psychopathy is a well-studied area of psychology and neuroscience, and we can identify brain patterns that allow clinicians to assess psychopathy with a high probability of being correct. This gives us something close to a real-world example of the “perfect stoic,” taken to an extreme beyond what any philosophy actually advocates. What’s striking is that psychopathy is strongly associated not with superior functioning, but with impulsivity, poor long-term planning, and difficulty integrating into society.
The takeaway is uncomfortable but important: emotions are not merely noise that interferes with rationality. They function as behavioral guardrails. Remove them entirely and pure logic alone is insufficient to regulate behavior in a social world. Without those constraints, people don’t become hyper-rational idealists. They become unstable, maladaptive, and conspicuously out of place.
I think the main reason is that social behavior is not rational as a first-order effect. It is irrational at the local level and only becomes rational indirectly, sometimes as a side effect of a side effect.
For example, if I see someone on the street who has just been stabbed, the strictly first-order rational response is to ignore it and keep walking. Helping costs time, energy, and introduces personal risk. From a narrow perspective, conserving resources dominates. Why spend calories calling an ambulance when ignoring it is cheaper?
The second- or third-order effects are where things change. Someone might see you help and treat you differently later, or the person you helped might repay you in some way. But in any single instance, those payoffs are unlikely. Most of the time you get nothing. Likewise, any stigma for not helping can evaporate quickly. People have short memories.
The real effect shows up in aggregate. If you consistently apply this kind of extreme local rationality minute to minute, people notice. Over time, patterns form. You are perceived as cold, unreliable, or unsafe to depend on, and you are gradually shunned. It’s not even the second-order effects that matter most, but the cumulative aggregation of them.
This is where evolution matters. Natural selection is the ultimate trial-based selector. It does not care about what is logically defensible in a single instance. It selects for strategies that survive repeated interaction with reality over long time horizons.
But selection does not operate only at the level of isolated individuals. Humans evolved in groups, and many traits exist specifically to regulate group dynamics. Emotions such as empathy, guilt, shame, and moral outrage function not just to guide personal behavior, but to coordinate groups and enforce norms. They create alignment without requiring explicit calculation.
Just as importantly, groups evolve mechanisms to identify and prune individuals who don’t internalize those constraints. Someone who consistently defects, exploits, or optimizes locally at the expense of others may do fine in isolated interactions, but over time they are marked, excluded, or expelled. This pruning is not moral. It is functional. Groups that fail to do it collapse under free-riding and mistrust.
Seen through this lens, emotions are not optional. They are load-bearing components of social systems. They bias individuals toward cooperation and simultaneously give groups tools to detect and remove those who can’t or won’t play by the same rules.
Natural selection already ran this experiment at scale. Psychopathy illustrates what happens when these mechanisms are weakened or absent. What remains is not a superior form of rationality, but a system that optimizes locally, destabilizes its environment, and ultimately selects itself out.
In that context, stoicism is best understood not as a prescription to remove emotion, but as an attempt to discipline it. Whether it succeeds depends on how narrowly or literally it is interpreted. Taken as emotional suppression or pure rational control, it collapses into the same failure modes already visible in the clinical and evolutionary evidence. Taken more loosely, it functions less as a truth about human behavior and more as a coping framework with limited scope.
I can’t help but think that the rise in stoicisms popularity among manosphere types because it lets them repackage a lot of more undesirable masculine traits under a legitimate label— You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
Whether those traits a “real stoicism” or not doesn’t matter, because that’s the way it gets spread through TikTok length discourse
I think that’s more a critique of the modern caricature of stoicism than of Stoicism itself. Classical Stoicism isn’t about suppressing emotions. It’s about understanding your emotions, examining where they come from, and choosing how you respond rather than being ruled by them.
Also it's about learning to distinguish between stuff we can influence vs stuff we cannot. Like I cannot influence if the sun rises tomorrow or not, so there's not point in worrying about it
understanding, examining and choosing are all thinking based. and that's why stoicism isn't really working well for humans. emotions are neuropsychologically lower level than thoughts/logic/ratio. having said that, lectures about stoicism might well be excellent instructions for language models on how to handle communication with humans.
Part of practicing Stoicism is to bring emotions up to the understanding, examining, and choosing level. You still have emotions, but you don't let them control you.
I love JiuJitsu because many parts of it are like microcosms of life. The first time someone lays on you and you feel like you can't breath, you panic. That's an emotion. After a few times you realize you can breath and eventually you will feel the panic and instead of succumbing, it'll wash past you. By practicing feeling emotions, especially negative ones like being uncomfortable over and over, eventually they move into your higher level thinking and no longer control you. You absolutely still have them, but your reaction to them has changed.
It's more to separate the feeling from the reaction to the feeling by a layer of understanding & examination. Feel first, understand the feeling, examine whether the feeling is appropriate for the situation that caused it, determine how to react, react. It's an OODA loop applied to one's own emotions: Observe the feeling, Orient on the situation, Decide on a response, Act as decided. If you pre-decide to always suppress any reaction you're missing the point. Stoicism is quite similar to modern Cognitive Behavior Therapy. If you just react without thinking you'll often react to your learned habits rather than the actual situation at hand.
And now that I've read that the second time, this is very close to various kinds of therapy.
For example, anxiety exists and sometimes occurs, and it means parts of me are trying to be very careful and precise about something. This can be a problem at times if it overcomes you, but it can also be leveraged into a strength once you figure why it's flaring up at the moment.
Another example, travel used to be a nuisance, but now I've setup and continue refining some packing and preparation checklists for trips of varying length. Now it's a big no-brainer to be well-prepared for a short work-trip and I'm usually very calm about it.
One thing that's worth noting is that Epictetus himself was a slave, and I think it's informed a lot of his thoughts. For him, true freedom is being able to overcome the events of the world. You may not be able to control whether or not you're a slave, but (to Epictetus) you can control how you feel about being a slave, and that is true freedom.
ie, he saw the world as full of misery and difficulty, and saw modifying your internal experience as the only possible path forward.
Huh, I never saw it that way but it makes sense. I guess the cruelest thing to do to Epictetus would then be to make him believe he could be anything other than a slave, if only he worked hard enough. Oh...
Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world and adopted the same outlook. there were people along the whole spectrum between slave and emperor who also did.
Even better, where did you get the opinions? are they definitely your own, did you choose them from all available options by picking the ones that were best for you, or did you passively absorb them from people who can profit from giving you those opinions?
This is the exact phrasing I was just searching for, and I fear the same thing that this pop stoicism revival is trying to formalize some really asocial behaviors.
It's not just pop stoicism. For years now it seems to me that a lot of memes regarding personal conduct spread on social media that essentially try to dress up toxic behavior in a positive light and encourage it.
I'm aware that society had these same sorts of issues prior to social media but it's still depressing watching it play out.
Reminds of “We belief something first, and then we pick our reasons for it.”
People aren’t really engaging with their philosophy (“love of wisdom”) but pick and choose so it reinforces what they already believe. They don’t exactly think about it they stay mildly glossing some concepts in the popular amateur/ social media sphere.
In some ways I always wonder if this Build-A-Bear thingy we've developed in the last 100 or so years regarding spirituality, morals, principles and all that as an alternative to traditional religious practices isn't just as lame as what it's meant to replace but in its own kind.
I'm not advocating for religious institutions or theocracy, mind you, I'm trying to formulate an argument how someone talking about how living life in accordance to Stoics on YouTube or Christ in a church is more of an aesthetics issue than a virtue one.
Though I feel by the time I successfully formulate that argument I'll have multiple groups clamoring for my head.
I’m tired of the whole “toxic masculinity” framing.
First, it’s sloppy. Plenty of genuinely harmful traits exist, but trying to pin them to “masculine” or “feminine” archetypes is more ideology than analysis. If the problem is bad behavior, just call it bad behavior. Adding a gender label doesn’t improve clarity, it just adds noise.
Second, it’s selectively applied. Many traits that are equally destructive are rarely labeled at all, usually because they’re expressed indirectly or through social maneuvering rather than overt force. That doesn’t make them less harmful, just harder to name without breaking the narrative.
More broadly, labeling a negative trait as inherently “masculine” is simply rude and unnecessary. “Undesirable traits” works fine and doesn’t require turning half the population into a rhetorical prop.
As a non-toxic and extremely moral male biological specimen, I’ll just note that attaching moral failure to the male gender category feels oddly out of step with modern norms around inclusivity. It’s as vile and disgusting as referring to a person by the wrong pronoun.
I think you should understand the terms as "toxic masculinity" as opposed to "positive masculinity". It's not saying masculinity is toxic. Or if you want, as opposed to "true masculinity" - reframing masculinity as a positive thing when expressed correctly.
Why do undesirable or desirable behaviours need a sex/gender label at all? Asshole behaviour isn't gender-specific. Maybe people should just focus on criticizing specific undesirable behaviours, and praising specific desirable behaviours.
If you replaced "males" in that sentence with ... well, let's be honest here, pretty much any other category, the statement would likely be deemed entirely unacceptable and the comment censored (ie [flagged][dead]) in short order.
Regardless of how the statistics for that specific set of behaviors break down my personal experience is that both the application and acceptance of such terminology (ie referring to various sets of behaviors which it might make sense to group together based on whatever metric) is highly selective in a manner that's convenient for the party expressing it. The statement is often true but the grouping superfluous, included only (seemingly) to push an agenda.
In this specific discussion, the traits labelled as toxic masculinity were as follows:
> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
The person who most embodies these traits for me, in my life, is...my mum. I don't view them as exclusively toxic any more than I view them as exclusively masculine, either. Sometimes you really do just choose to hug your kids even when they were aggravating little twits five minutes ago and you're still mad at them, and that's a good thing.
The term is overused. Females have extremely toxic behavior as well. But the term toxic feminist is not used to label them. It’s nowhere near as extreme.
It's strange. Clearly at some point society at large came to believe that the current crop of terms at the time was undesirable. Yet various modern analogues are treated differently.
But there is no corresponding discussion of "toxic femininity", or if there is, it is that discussion is framed as more "toxic masculinity" from the "manosphere".
It's a term used to apply guilt across all males to subvert any actual debate.
Crime is also overwhelmingly associated with race. Intelligence quotient as well. We don’t characterize race by statistical facts because we would offend the outliers.
I think it’s important to follow etiquette in common language rather then label entire minorities or groups based off of statistics.
It's funny because while I believe the concept of toxic masculinity is absolutely badly used in general, and should be seen with suspicion, here is one of the real examples it makes sense to use it. There absolutely people (Andrew rate is one of the most famous) that prey on the weaknesses and toxic aspects of masculinity (you have also the same for female weaknesses and toxicity)
I use the term not for traits and behaviours I think are masculine, but are sold as being masculine, which are toxic. An example would be that it's masculine to not cry or show emotions (whereas woman are labeled as "emotional"). Suppressing emotions is nothing gender specific of course, but when certain groups promote that as "masculine", calling that "toxic masculinity" makes sense IMO.
I still think this is where the framing quietly breaks down.
What you’re describing is not “masculinity” being toxic, but a particular sales pitch that smuggles bad norms under the masculinity label. Historically, this is exactly how language like “that’s so gay” operated. People didn’t mean “homosexual” in any literal sense. They meant weak, unserious, emotionally incontinent, indulgent. If pressed, the defense was always the same: I’m not talking about gay people, I’m talking about the stereotype society wrongly attaches to them.
The move is familiar because it works rhetorically. You get to criticize a behavior while outsourcing the moral weight to an identity category. The identity absorbs the stain, even if everyone insists that’s not what they meant.
We’ve seen this pattern over and over:
“Real men don’t cry.”
“Be a man” meaning suppress emotion, not develop discipline.
“That’s gay” meaning fragile or contemptible.
“Masculine energy” marketed as dominance without responsibility.
“Feminine energy” marketed as intuition without accountability.
In every case, the failure isn’t gendered. It’s human. But the label does the work of making it feel natural to aim the critique at a group rather than the behavior itself.
This is why the analogy matters. Society eventually realized that using “gay” as a stand-in for negative traits was lazy at best and corrosive at worst, even when people swore they weren’t talking about actual gay people. The word still carried the freight.
I’m just applying the same standard here, as a proud champion of masculinity and part-time custodian of its reputation.
If the problem is emotional suppression, call it emotional suppression.
If the problem is social pressure to perform invulnerability, call that out.
If the problem is dominance without accountability, say so plainly.
Masculinity, like femininity, is a broad distribution of traits, not a slogan. Strength and restraint. Risk-taking and responsibility. Stoicism and emotional regulation. The pathologies show up when any of those lose balance, not because they’re “masculine.”
We spent decades correctly arguing that femininity itself wasn’t the problem, only the caricatures imposed on it. I’m simply extending that courtesy to masculinity, which seems overdue.
As a non-toxic, extremely moral male biological specimen and self-appointed advocate for masculine dignity, I’m fully in favor of men crying, feeling, and communicating. I just don’t think masculinity needs to be rhetorically sacrificed to achieve that outcome.
If anything, masculinity should be defended, rehabilitated, and held to a higher standard, not permanently prefixed with an asterisk.
> ... As a non-toxic, extremely moral male biological specimen and self-appointed advocate for masculine dignity, I’m fully in favor of men crying, feeling, and communicating. ...
The whole point is that men communicating about their inner emotions and feelings have to learn to be extremely diplomatic about it, lest their communication be misinterpreted by others (intentionally or not!) as them just freaking out and throwing an angry temper tantrum. Men have responsibilities to those around them that ultimately require developing strong discipline and keeping their emotions under check, at least to a very significant extent. This is what the whole notion of "toxic masculinity/femininity/whatever" is getting at; ultimately, uncontrolled anger and other negative emotions can be a whole lot more toxic than simple emotional restraint.
> As a non-toxic and extremely moral male biological specimen, I’ll just note that attaching moral failure to the male gender category feels oddly out of step with modern norms around inclusivity. It’s as vile and disgusting as referring to a person by the wrong pronoun.
This would read like satire in most places besides HN
As someone who has been interested in actual Stoicism for years, yes, there is a whole industry of people monetizing cherry-picked bullet points to serve up what people already want to hear. The fact it all comes with a less-than-subtle sheen of "Western Thought" widens the audience to not just men who don't think real good, but also racists. Happily, now that can be accelerated with AI as we simultaneously remove actual Greek philosophers from college entirely!
I would love to sit back with some quotation from Marcus Aurelius about how it's not anything I have to worry about, but that's the part I never quite bought into with Stoicism I suppose. So ignore all of the above.
I got interested a few years back thanks to Derren Brown's book "Happy" (recommended). I have found it helpful. I can't say I actually do any of the exercises, but it has slightly reframed how I think about my own wellbeing and happiness.
edit: I've missed all this new bite sized version stuff though precisely because I avoid bite size stuff like the plague. TikTok and the TikTokification of everything else can fuck right off. I'm looking at you, YouTube.
The modern/online resurgence of stoicism isn’t driven by people that have studied actual books.
It’s being driven by people that are making tiktoks after they learned about it by watching a five minute YouTube video. It’s a very lossy game of telephone.
Pop philosophy being turned into AI audio transcribed by a cool video game character (also being mostly AI generated) is clearly the crowning jewel of our civilization.
In the past I've been trying to adopt the stoic mindset, but always struggled. But I continued to read and learn about it.
Unrelatedly, I came across a recomendation for David Burns "Feeling Good" here on hackernews a couple of years ago.
Reading it with my interest in stoicism in mind, I honestly found it to be probably the best modern day handbook to actually adopting the stoic mindset - without ever mentioning it.
As far as I understand stoicism, it is all about seeing things as they are, and understanding that the only thing that we really control is our reaction / interpretation of events. And the CBT approach that is explained in Feeling Good/Feeling Great is exactly how you do this.
With this perspective Marcus Aurelius Meditations suddenly make a lot more sense. They are his therapy homework.
If anyone Googles it and is wondering about Feeling Good (1999) and Feeling Great (2020) by the same author, it seems like Feeling Great is just an updated version of the original book, based on more experience and new insights. Here's the author discussing the difference:
A lot of comments here use this metaphor of emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed or they will accumulate and explode.
I think this can be traced to pop-psychology bullshit, and there isn't any neuroscientific basis backing it up.
It seems like wishful thinking by people who like expressing their emotions to others and want to justify their spend on therapists, or their occasional emotional outbursts.
Instead, the evidence points to the brain building habits around emotions and their regulation the same way it builds habits around everything else.
If you practice not feeling emotions or becoming identified with them, then that habit will continue and they will become easier to not feel.
There is not a debt to be paid, or a buildup to be released.
This is often framed in different ways, mediators talk about "creating distance" and "noticing but not indulging".
The timeless grug-brain approach is "ignoring", described by emotional people as "bottling up".
These are different ways to frame the same phenomenon, which is that the brain does what it has practiced.
A Stoic would say that negative emotions have root causes in the misconceptions you hold about how the world works, and what you can and cannot affect about it. If you don't proactively address those root causes (which doesn't require "expressing" the emotion, but does require noticing and judging it without reflexive acceptance) the negativity will in fact "keep flowing" and your short-term disregard of it will be less and less effective.
It's not a good "habit" to disregard negative emotions without also examining them.
>emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed
Yes, this does seem to be the assumption that many are (uncritically?) making. I wonder where this idea comes from. Anyone know the provenance of this? Has this concept been handed down from antiquity? Or Jung or Freud or ? Or is this something relatively modern?
While it isn't expressly stoic, I'm liking the gray rock tactic more and more as I age. You can just not fight the people who are rude to you and not engage with ideas that frustrate you. When you reduce your personal connections to what you have direct control over and your actual responsibility, the need to argue with most people is very low.
I like the moral part of Stoicism a lot, and even though the original texts are slightly morbid, the core idea makes perfect logical sense. You can't fully control things outside of your mind, and when you try to control them, you suffer (e.g. you don't want to get sick, but you will, you don't want to get old , but you will)
What I struggled with was applying this "logical understanding" to my day-to-day life. In other words, the recommended practice of morning and evening meditation was always too early and too late, respectively. I needed to have tools to use in the difficult moments directly.
I recently discovered Acceptance Commitment Therapy - It's an interesting mix of mindfulness and living in accordance with your values. If you also struggle to bring the stoic teachings to your minute-by-minute life, give the book "ACT made simple" a try.
There are differences.. Stoic teaching would have you analyse the thought (impression) and discard it as something out of your control. Whilst ACT will have you accept that the thought exists, but not identify with it. Stoics give you the values (virtues), ACT lets you pick them. But all in all, those two approaches are complementary.
Stoicism has always struck me as cognitive behavioural therapy (specifically the cognitive triangle) but for boys who think therapy is for women and is rife for misuse from people who don't understand it.
I understand stoicism is deeply entwined with modern CBT and the roots can be traced back basically, but why misuse the ancient form when we have decades of evolution and study on CBT?
I think a lot of modern day stoicism is stoicism-without-hardship. And I think hardship is necessary for stoicism - otherwise all you have is determined detachment, which is something else entirely.
Ton arrière-arrière grand-père a vécus la grosse misère
ton arrière grand-pere il ramassait des cennes noires
et pis ton grand-pere miracle est devenue millionaires
ton pere en na hériter il a toute mit dans ses réer
et pis toé tite jeunesse tu doit ton cul au ministaire.
pas moyen davoir. un prés dans une intitustion banquaire.
pour calmer tes envie de huldoper la cassière tu lit des livre qui parle ... de simplicité vonlontaire
- I think each generation can have a different reason for adopting any philosophy it’s about whether it serves you or not.
> Any misfortune ‘that lies outside the sphere of choice’ should be considered an opportunity to strengthen our resolve, not an excuse to weaken it.
This is a solid reframe that has helped me in difficult times: any bad luck turned from a setback/obstacle to an empowering stepping stone to the next level.
I don't know how much the modern take on stoicism diverges from its historical origins, but I'm among those who believe that it ultimately pumps a delusion: that one can solve mind aches with mind hacks. Contemplative mystics (e.g. Zen, Dao) can recognize in stoicism some elemental truths --mainly that our emotions tend to be driven by the fiction created by thoughts--, but they also see it as incomplete at best and at worst, just another misguided attempt at trusting the mind as a solution architect to the problems that it creates, which often results in other subtler problems like bypassing.
Such traditions don't practice control or avoidance of emotions, but rather use them as teaching devices through aware observation when they manifest in experience (bodily sensations and thoughts). Through this "witnessing" there's realization of their fundamental nature, along with surrendering and integration of shadow elements. On the surface the result may appear the same as what stoicism purports to give you, but there's a radical difference. Where stoicism aims for thought-driven control, mystics know there's none to be found and instead encourage to trust in and to reconnect with our intuitive nature. Allow pain, feel it fully, let it go, and return in the flow.
If you're not into mysticism, but are interested in this kind of work for the practical purpose of navigating your experience of life with less suffering, here's a secular curriculum: start with some embodiment practice (contemplation in bodily sensations, yoga nidra, body scan meditations, soft butter meditations, Tai Chi, Qigong, any physical activity done with heightened awareness of the body), find a good teacher or therapist to guide you into Shadow Work, supplement with regular Trauma and Tension Release Exercises (TRE), sprinkle some Loving Kindness meditations to take things to another level. Do this and you won't just look the part, you'll feel it to your core.
> Where stoicism aims for thought-driven control, mystics know there's none to be found and instead encourage to trust in and to reconnect with our intuitive nature. Allow pain, feel it fully, let it go, and return in the flow.
The idea that thought is also ultimately driven by intuitions is one that stoics would've been quite familiar with. Part of the problem here is a definitional matter: should we restrict our view solely to the negative emotions, or admit that a positive "spirit" also exists in us that's ultimately just as intuitive and emotional? There isn't one single answer AIUI; both views are useful for different purposes, but it's true that a more "mystical" point of view could lead us to the latter. Some of the Stoics do talk about notions like "the good and bad daimon (or genius)" in ways that might somehow hint at the same reality, even though these intuitions are quite hard to understand in a modern context.
My journey with stoicism has been useful and powerful at every phase, but for future and fellow walkers of this path I leave advice:
You you a mindful stoic or a dissociated one?
I'd argue dissociation, at least in the short term, is a critical part of the process. To not let the gut reactions carry you away. You do often need to realize, those reactions are still often happening. You body does it's own thing and you need to be mindful when it does that. Fear, shock, anxiety, elation, they all happen even if you keep a clear conscious mind. The in the situation, the work is in correcting for the biases they give.
In the medium term, if you aren't going back and holding the emotions you set aside, you are doing it wrong. Stoicism sells as "magical no emotion land" but you are flesh and flesh has emotions. Both reasonable and unreasonable. You job is to manage and integrate them effectively.
Stoicism is a good toolkit for managing and analyzing emotions, but if you don't add going back and feeling those emotions to the tools, you are just a timebomb running an emotional debt and dissociating from it. I've done that, and watched others do the same. Odds are this message won't actually change things if you are there right now, but maybe it will nudge you in the right direction.
> In the medium term, if you aren't going back and holding the emotions you set aside, you are doing it wrong. Stoicism sells as "magical no emotion land" but you are flesh and flesh has emotions. Both reasonable and unreasonable. You job is to manage and integrate them effectively.
I think it's helpful not to identify with your emotions. You may experience emotions, but you are not your emotions. That's the difference between saying "I'm angry" and "I feel anger arising within me."
I guess what I don't get about this is: couldn't you apply the same mode to other internal states? "I understand this," vs "I feel understanding arising in me?"
Maybe that is good, now that I write it out. I think "understanding" is actually a pretty dumb mental state to invest a lot in.
That is a dissociating mode, a more mindful one, but still intentionally distancing yourself from your experiences. It works great for improving your perception of yourself and being mindful. Its a meditation.
It also isn't really available in a crisis, in the moment. All our long term work is really to train the anxious idiot part of ourselves who runs the show most of the time how to cope with what the world and body are doing right now. That person is very much connected to their emotions, no matter what story we make up about it. You need practice being that person feeling those emotions as well as practice analyzing them.
> I can't imagine e.g. taking some time on Sunday afternoon to feel that panic I suppressed from the crisis on Monday.
Almost literally that. Revisit the moments that made you "suppress" things. Think of it as a post-mortem. It won't be the same, an echo distorted by time and distance, But pay attention to what you set aside. Suppressing emotions is the short term hack. The ideal is to be able to have them and still be centered. Only way to get better at that is practice.
Stoicism is like recommending having a couple drinks ( literally ) to a "normal" person with mild social anxiety with a need to go out in the World and live life.
It works and it's good advice.
Unfortunately it gets recommended to everybody at every point in their lives, which include alcoholics and people in crisis.
In a more direct way: Stop with this "no emotion" "I'm a fortress" bullshit. It only helps a narrow group of people in specific circumstances of their lives but wreaks havoc on everybody else because it's misplaced and mostly a lie or at least a very incomplete picture.
Samkhya Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya) gives a far more comprehensive model to analytically go beyond the three sources of suffering (viz. from own body/mind, from other beings/things, from acts of god).
You can then think of specific practices from Buddhism eg. Tibetan Lojong - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojong - and Stoicism as applications within that framework.
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, what use is the rule?”
The primary thing many who follow Stoicism do is tell people how much Stoicism they’re doing.
Every time I see someone espousing Stoicism I never think to myself “I would love to be like that guy”.
These two things together make it seem like it’s just a viral meme. The male equivalent of the TikTok insistence that they won’t date anyone who “doesn’t go to therapy”.
My favourite part of stoicism is needing to use the example of an emperor ruling over people trying to stay grounded as he can given the unfortunate circumstances of being the ruler of everything as the way forward for every average man to deeply relate to.
Stoicism has its definite positives, but balancing the privileged emperor is always worth being mindful and expressive of.
I used to be a fan, it entirely ruined CBT for me - you can only gaslight yourself so well into ignoring emotional compass and I think I maxed it out before encountering CBT approach.
My absolute favorite (this is irony) form of stoicism in the modern era is when a company director paid some multiple of your salary sends a daily stoic quote to everyone in the organization that amounts to telling people to work longer hours and accept more abuse and to shut up about not getting even cost-of-living raises because they should be grateful that they're employed at all. Should people be grateful for employment? Mmmmm....debatable. Should that be the chosen form of interaction from a position of imbalanced power? My fucking god, no. Try being slightly less of a sociopath.
Since the Covid theater, Stoicism is everywhere: that's why I don't read about it anymore because wherever the mass and Pavlov dogs head, the truth is elsewhere.
That's kind of a narrow take; the mainstream may be directed towards a good thing and just not have the depth to draw a benefit, its attention being superficial and fleeting.
E.g. the Pavlovian dog metaphor is quite a mainstream trope, but doesn't it carry an important message nevertheless?
If anything, I would say that fleeting takes and offhand dismissals are what determines and solidifies the mainstream's superficiality.
> Stockdale rejected the false optimism proffered by Christianity, because he knew, from direct observation, that false hope is how you went insane in that prison.
With all due respect to Stockdale, I wonder what definition of "Christianity" he had in mind. Historic, biblical Christianity doesn't make delusive promises to palliate suffering by implying that it will be brief or underwhelming. Just read the depths that David was brought to in the Psalms, or Job's experience, or the Apostle Paul's. Look at the thousands upon thousands of steeled and joyful Christian martyrs under the persecution by the Roman empire.
Rather the Scriptures again and again plainly tell us to expect suffering - but the remedy goes far deeper than a mere Stoical submission to an impersonal logos in nature. Suffering, contrary to the Stoics, is not natural - to pretend that it is goes against our deepest sensibilities and experience. Rather the Scriptures explain the reason for suffering - it is due to living in a world that is experiencing the consequences of rebellion against its Creator. It should hurt, and denying this places us in an inevitable contradiction.
The Stoics may argue this isn't much different than their own philosophy - both recognize it's a reality one way or another after all. However, Christianity goes on and ascends far higher, both subjectively and objectively. Both speak of the Logos, but the Logos of Christianity is far more than a distant, abstract principle. He is the one who cannot suffer, but who entered into this world of suffering through the Incarnation to redeem men by suffering more than any of them ever will.
Thus Christianity presents a realist's view of suffering - it is common, deep, often bewildering. But Christians _are_ to submit to it as for their ultimate good. Like the Stoic, the Christian accepts it as a refiners fire:
> My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
But unlike the Stoic, the Christian sees the source of it is far more personal, and will bring him to a far greater victory and joy than the best of the Stoics every could achieve.
> For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. ... And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. ... Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
I can understand the draw to Stoicism felt by many today, and respect the movement in many ways, but I think the neo-Stoics overlook a greater philosophy, one which eventually drew in vast numbers of Stoics seeking a better way.
You really have to already be privileged, and not directly affected by these so-called “external causes” the author talks about, to be able to take comfort in ignoring them. But is that even desirable? Do we actually want to live in a society where the privileged ignore other people’s problems simply because they can? Is it even acceptable to say: “A fascist militia (ICE) kills a lesbian woman for no reason other than the fact that she is lesbian, but since I’m not the one targeted by ICE, I should disconnect from social media, turn off the TV, and ignore this injustice”?
Not only can external problems that affect our mental health serve as a driving force for action—because it is possible to organize and fight against the causes of these injustices—but in addition, inaction in the face of what is initially “external” inevitably leads to a point where we ourselves become affected by those same injustices.
I want to quote a sermon by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, who spoke precisely about this:
> First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—
> Because I was not a Communist.
>
> Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
> Because I was not a Socialist.
>
> Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
> Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
>
> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
> Because I was not a Jew.
>
> Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Yawn I am so over stoicism being the philosophy du jour. I shouldn't be surprised, since it's stony individualism aligns extremely well with the amoral and increasingly draconian imperatives of unbridled, self-interested capital (I guess one could write a book on this), but man seeing it constantly referenced in dumbed down contentless rehashing of the surface level engagements one could have with a body of thought in all this popular media is becoming so tiring.
If you're actually interested in stoicism I highly encourage picking up books by some actual scholars.
While stoicism was not invented by Marcus Aurelius the particular flavor referred to these days was and let’s be absolutely clear what it was:
Stoicism was Aurelius ways to justify mass death and conquering of an empire while creating a mental patterns that roughly said “don’t worry too much about.”
Happiness only comes from the achievement of values. The greatest bamboozlement of stoicism is teaching people to be indifferent to achieving their values. It lobotomizes upside gains in a world that's full of opportunity to a mind of reason.
> teaching people to be indifferent to achieving their values
That's inaccurate. Stoicism teaches indifference to outcomes you don’t fully control, while demanding total commitment to the values you do control such as your character, choices, and actions.
If Socratic philosophy is the greatest threat to state power, Stoicism is the framework for mass compliance. It's a psychological strategy for emotional management that replaces the traditional goals of inquiry. This system encourages individuals to obey authority and limit their emotional range to reach a state of internal comfort. This objective discourages the act of questioning. In this regard, it functions as an anti-philosophy.
The modern interest in Stoicism in my opinion is a move toward a secular version of the Christian experience. Modern Stoicism retains the Christian emphasis on submission and endurance while ignoring the superstitious elements inherent in Stoic physics, such as providential fatalism.
If your objective is to maintain a state of functioning passivity, Stoicism is the effective solution (but I wouldn't recommend it).
In some sense I agree, there is a level of defeatism in at least part of the wisdom of the stoics and very little questioning of authority. You do have the "If it's not right don't do it, if it's not true don't say it", and you are suppose to act on things if they are within your control. There's just no encouragement that you're more capable than you think or that you should do anything beyond "The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury." That doesn't really topple oppressive regimes.
It's a bit of a interesting take, you should act with virtue, but there is no encouragement to act against oppression and question authority. It seems very much like something to ignore and hope there's not a clash.
I don't think of stoicism as passive, though - it is just about responding rationally rather than irrationally, and one important aspect is focus on what can actually be modified, controlled or accomplished, not on fantasy. That idea seems crucial to modernity, where the main manner of control is to dangle outrage after outrage in front of everyone to keep them focused on spectacle and NOT focused on what they can actually, materially, physically do to change the world.
I find classic Stoicism interesting, but these modern social media and influencer versions of Stoicism feel like something else entirely.
The heading and subheading of this article invoke ideas of indifference and warriors and prisoners. This appeals to frustrated people, more often men, who are struggling with emotional regulation and want a solution that feels like a tough response.
Maybe there’s something useful in here, but more often than not when I see younger people I work with invoke stoicism it’s as a weak defensive mechanism to dodge their emotions for a while rather than deal with them. The modern simplified ideal of stoicism is just being too tough to care and flexing to show others that you don’t care.
Anecdotally, I haven’t seen anyone embrace this social media version of stoicism and thrive on it long term. At best it’s just a phase that helps them get past something temporary, but at worst it’s a misleading ideal that leads them to bottling up and ignoring problems until they become too unbearable to ignore. Some times you do have to care and you have to address the root cause, not just listen to some influencers telling you to be so tough you don’t care like legions of warriors and prisoners in past literature.
Proper Stoicism is not about dodging your emotions, it's very much about dodging the adverse behavioral effects of your emotions. You're encouraged to work through your emotions proactively and in depth (the Stoics encouraged askesis which literally means 'training' or 'exercise') so that they don't adversely affect you and others down the road. Of course, you should also learn how to counter these effects in the moment, which often involves temporarily repressing and "bottling up" disagreeable emotions, such as anger. But there's really no expectation in the sources that this will suffice long term.
> Proper Stoicism is not about dodging your emotions, it's very much about dodging the adverse behavioral effects of your emotions.
I’m not disagreeing with this. I understand classic stoicism, but I’ve also seen the effects of modern pseudo-stoicism as pushed by influencers and social media.
Focusing on stoicism and trying to dodge the effects of your emotions is a reasonable strategy for someone who is truly stuck in a situation, like the prisoners or warriors cited in the article.
But it becomes a self-defeating action when the situation you’re dealing with is something that should be addressed or changed rather than dealing with it like you’re a prisoner and helpless victim. The common example is someone in a toxic job who is furiously consuming stoicism social media and trying to act stoic in the face of a job they hate instead of using that energy to apply for another job.
ISTM that improving one's emotional self-regulation is an excellent first-line response to being in what seems to be a toxic job. It may be that leaving that job and applying for another is still the right thing to do, all things considered, but we cannot know for sure unless we are in that situation ourselves and can de-stress enough to do a proper evaluation of it.
I agree that improving emotional regulation is a first step to building up the energy to change a situation.
My issue with modern internet style pseudo-stoicism is that it's fixated on becoming indifferent (the title of this article, even) and breeds a sort of learned helplessness. The article's sub-heading is about prisoners and warriors, but using techniques optimized for being a prisoner or stuck in a war isn't quite right for someone navigating a toxic relationship or toxic job where you're not actually entirely helpless.
It isn’t the fault of an ancient philosophy that modern humans twist it into superficial slob.
It certainly isn’t an indictment against Stoicism.
> It isn’t the fault of an ancient philosophy
As I said, I’m talking about the article and the pseudo-stoicism pushed on social media
another example are soldiers who adapted to war and have to reintegrate back into society.
Indeed, one exercise is negative visualization. Think about the worst thing that can happen in other words, simulate the feelings and mentally rehearse a measured response.
It's learning to not burden yourself with things you cannot control.
When applied indiscriminately as a fix-all philosophy, it treats everything as something you cannot control.
That's the problem.
>these modern social media and influencer versions of Stoicism feel like something else entirely
Yes, the pop philosophy folks tend to confuse Stoicism with Spartanism, just like they confuse Epicureanism with Hedonism. It also helps to have a basic understanding of ancient Aretaic (Virtue) Ethics and the context in which some of these works were written (e.g., was one work or school of thought developed in response to some other one that preceded it).
As always, it's best to read the original works, and in the case of the Stoics (Epictetus, Aurelius, Seneca) they're really not difficult reads assuming a decent modern translation.
Also stay away from the manosphere influencers who peddle the weird self help stuff you allude to, whether under the guise of Stoicism or anything else.
What's the difference between Epicureanism and Hedonism?
Epicureanism is sustainable hedonism.
Sustainable and importantly ethical.
I'm not even sure you've nailed "classic" stoicism. More than a few stoics have related stoicism to normalizing your reaction to something that happens to you as if it happened to someone else. It implies maintaining a perspective that the world just does and that it's largely impersonal.
People invoke Marcus Aurelius but are not really engaged in the classical study of Greek stoicism, they read into it what they want to see. It’s a lazy justification for what you already want. Any “epiphany” that comes from that is self serving, cloaked in moralistic terms.
it's Broicism; Modern self-help for dudes that think enjoying sex is feminine and washing your bung is homoerotic. The primary consumer is unlikely to read the entirety of The Meditations and prefers short, punchy aphorisms they can memorize.
I think of the "tough warrior philosopher" messaging as the installation medium for this hack. All hacks need an attractive bait/installer.
Once the hack sets in, you start reading more b/c you identify partially as "philosopher", and you start to see more of the genuine, peaceful, forgiving side, like in Meditations. The "we are all flawed men" kind of thing.
> I think of the "tough warrior philosopher" messaging as the installation medium for this hack. All hacks need an attractive bait/installer.
The average young person who discovers stoicism via articles like this or via an influencer isn’t going to do a deep dive into classic literature as the next step.
They’re going to seek out more influencer slop that delivers more of what drew them to it: The prisoner/warrior bait about being so tough that you don’t care about anything.
The average young person probably does nothing at all. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Some percentage of people will come to Stoicism via an influencer and continue to dig.
> Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
But it's not a choice between good or perfect. The internet style stoicism becomes a sort of learned helplessness for people who skim articles and think it means you should assume everything is out of your control and instead focus on ignoring your emotions.
The contention is with "good". Is it good to have a bunch of people becoming emotionally stunted in case a handful dig further? Presumably there were people moved to stoicism prior to the current influencer trend, is that not good enough?
That depends on how much credit you give to the average person. In this climate, probably a small amount, but I think the stoics would say that we should not judge them if they're not ready to hear the msg, but be glad they heard it and hope it settles in later.
Yes, exactly what I've been thinking about. I remember a conversation I had here a few years back where a few of us were sharing how growing up on forums like 4chan had implanted in us a deep nihilism and cynicism, and how that was being mistaken for stoicism, when really it's just being emotionally stunted.
I've been thinking about this modern idea of stoicism along the same lines you've written here. Basically it seems like a lot of self help is directed towards this idea of regulating and controlling yourself, often by trying to overcome our inherent flaws as humans, which I don't necessarily disagree with. However, take for example this from the article:
> has given the name ‘negative visualisation’. By keeping the very worst that can happen in our heads constantly, the Stoics tell us, we immunise ourselves from the dangers of too much so-called ‘positive thinking’, a product of the mind that believes a realistic accounting of the world can lead only to despair. Only by envisioning the bad can we truly appreciate the good; gratitude does not arrive when we take things for granted.
This is fighting an uphill battle. Rather than work against our own psychology, it seems to me that the better thing to do is to leverage our irrationality to great affect, which is what positive thinking and self actualization does. "Fake it til you make it" genuinely does work.
I'm starting to feel like the better path to take is the one that fully acknowledges and embraces all of our sloppiness. I've been doing this with my ADHD: rather than trying to leverage system upon system to normalize my behavior, I've tried giving up on that entirely and instead focusing more on directing things like hyperfocus in productive directions. I've been trying to put aside this lie I've been telling myself that I can be some strong independent man forging his own path, and spending lots of time with people, asking people lots of questions instead of going home to read on my own. Rather than try to master my willpower when it came to weight loss, I accepted my weakness and threw away all the snacks in the house.
I think stoicism still has its place in attempting to prevent e.g. self harming behavior in response to e.g. anger or depression (blowing up on someone for example), but I feel lately like it's a pointless lie to pretend we can go through life without letting other people affect our emotions; or if not a lie, then that to try to do so cuts us off from an absolutely critical aspect of human existence.
> I think stoicism still has its place in attempting to prevent e.g. self harming behavior ...
Stoic sources actually state explicitly that Stoic ethics is all about preventing "self-harming behavior" arising from our emotions. They just have a much more expansive definition of what's "self-harming" than modern society does! Raw emotional responses are seen as mere facts of nature that cannot be meaningfully avoided and repressed, but they can still be subjected to reasonable judgment, and then accepted or critiqued. The common modern idea that Stoicism is merely about emotional repression and a totally "unemotional" stance is quite a misconception.
> The common modern idea that Stoicism is merely about emotional repression and a totally "unemotional" stance is quite a misconception.
Honestly, I blame Mr. Spock. Another thought I've been chewing on is emotional repression from a certain crowd of people who grew up as socially isolated nerds and / or autists that identified strongly with what they perceived as hyper rational characters like Spock. Sprinkle in high technology and the fact that these characters succeed at things nerds love and you get hero worship and emulation. Then add in all the masculine marketing we get from "stoic" characters like the dude from Drive to get another layer to the equation.
This is one of those rare cases where I believe young men would benefit from reading more Nietzsche.
"Do you want to live 'according to nature'? O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature - extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown - imagine this indifference itself as a power - how could you live in accordance with this indifference? Living - isn't that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn't living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?"
This just shows that Nietzsche did not understand stoicism on any deep level
Nietzsche never cared about understanding of anything, he had an agenda, a mission to fulfill. His arguments are always shallow and shifty - the quote provided by throw4847285 is a good illustration of it.
With that said, my words aren't an endorsement of Stoicism, nor am I against it - I know little about it because I don't think it addresses my specific needs.
If that's true, then what hope does anyone else have?
This is quoted (and addressed) near the beginning of the article (paragraphs 3 to 6), for what it's worth.
Well that's what I get for commenting before reading the article. A nasty habit.
Well now that I've read that part of the article, I can say that it's a pretty lame retort.
Very well put. I'd add the psychological concept of dissociation which seems to be central to the hackernews version of stoicism. Instead of connecting to your emotions it encourages pushing them down. That's just going to postpone the moment when you have to deal with them. Either because of psychosomatic illness, depression, burn out or mental breakdown. Attempting to influence, change, control feelings/emotions by rational concepts and thinking is doomed to fail. Emotions are on a lower level than verbal and logical mental processes.
As someone who has run multiple “empire tier” tech platforms, I’ve learned personally why you tend to develop this mindset.
This brand of stoicism you refer to is high order “cope” with your emotional self telling you it is wrong.
What ? You don't want to read a book by a total rando about how stoicism will transform you into an alpha male in 30 days and with a gen ai cover of a Greek warrior from 300 ?
this thread seems to be filled with a lot of folks that have read and understood actual stoicism but are unaware of the fact that a "pop stoicism" exists out in the world.
this leads to a lot of people talking past each other.
As an actual prisoner in solitary confinement, the principles of stoic acceptance helped me a lot. Control is a powerful myth. It is stunning once it is taken away.
>Stoicism is, as much as anything, a philosophy of gratitude – and a gratitude, moreover, rugged enough to endure anything.
Actual stoicism is kind of darkly funny. Here's a word-for-word (translated, of course) excerpt from Epictetus:
"It's possible to understand what nature wants from situations where we're no different from other people. For example, when a slave breaks someone else's cup we're instantly ready to say 'These things happen.' So when it's a cup of yours that gets broken, appreciate that you have the same attitude as when it's someone else's cup. Transfer the principle to things of greater importance. Has someone else's child or wife died? There's no one who wouldn't say 'So it goes.' But when it's one's own child or wife who's died, the automatic response is 'Oh, no!' and 'Poor me!' It's essential to remember how we feel when we hear of this happening to others."
There are a few (darkly) funny claims in here:
- _ANYONE_ would be pretty indifferent to hear that someone's wife or child has died.
- You should feel the same about your wife or child as someone else's.
- Potentially, you should feel the same way about your wife as you do a cup.
I'm being cheeky with the last one, and I don't think there's _nothing_ to the quote above, however I cannot imagine most people being able to adopt this view, or seeing it as a view which _should_ be adopted.
I suppose some of it is also not dark at all, and is simply funny. Here's another excerpt:
"If you're informed that someone or other is speaking ill of you, don't defend yourself against the allegations, but respond by saying: "Well, he must be unaware of my other faults, otherwise these wouldn't have been the only ones he mentioned."
It's stated a bit differently, but this is effectively the exact tact taken by Eminem's competition-winning rap in 8 Mile. "These guys think I'm bad? They missed all this obvious stuff, let me lay out all my faults for you."
Reminds me of Lincoln being called "two-face" by Douglas and replying “If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?”
Self deprecation can indeed be disarming. But it must never cross the point of eliminating self respect. That's when you go from easy going to pure loser.
Here are some other translations of that passage (Enchiridion 26): https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...
- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.
- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”
- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.
The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.
[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]
I find stoicism to be Taoism's spiritual sibling in the West. From the Dao De Jing, passage 5, Red Pine's translation:
"Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs / heartless is the sage / treating people like straw dogs..."
and his translation of one commentary:
"Heaven and Earth aren't partial. They don't kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them. This is how the sage treats the people."
It reflects a detached, broad perspective on the world, which does not deny our very attached and narrow view, but rather augments it and provides a counterweight to our suffering.
There's some passages in the Zhuangzi (another of the 3 central ancient Taoist texts, along with the Tao Te Ching and Liehzi) that feel very analogous. I'm too lazy to find actual translations right now so bear in mind my recollection may be flawed.
There's a part where it talks any how, if you're sailing on a river and an unoccupied boat comes down the river towards you, you simply avoid it. But if that boat were occupied, you might holler at the person to get out of your way, and it might be upsetting.
There's also a passage where Zhuangzi's wife has died, and his friend find him merrily beating a drum. He asks if this is the proper way to mourn his wife. Zhuangzi replies that he had initially cried and lamented when his wife passed, until he realized that she had become what she was before she had lived, and that to everything there was a season. (There's definitely more here than I remember off the top of my head.)
Tangentially, if one has only read the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi and Liehzi are also great and worth reading. The Liehzi is very short, and the Zhuangzi can be abridged to the first 7 chapters if desired. (Chapter 17 slaps but is mostly a reiteration of chapter 1.) You could read all 3 in a weekend (if you abridge Zhuangzi).
Some free audiobooks:
Tao Te Ching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCLpgXmK3cg [1hr]
Liehzi: https://librivox.org/the-book-of-lieh-tzu-by-lieh-tzu-transl... [3hr]
Zhuangzi abridged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCQYEeHlXOY [2hr]
I see it more as being about acceptance. If your wife dies, at some point, you will have to accept that your wife died and move on. This doesn't mean that you are cold or insensitive to it, it just means that you have accepted and processed this sorrow fully and are now ready to move on.
Stoicism for me is about practicing a sort of pre-acceptance of such things. To understand that everything bad that can happen eventually will happen (if you live long enough) and to accept it even before it has happened.
In more modern terms, I would call what Epictetus does here a reframing. It's used in therapy, marketing, PR and presumably other areas as well. Essentially it's saying "well, but if you look at it $this way$, it's not so bad, is it?" .
When strangers tell you that, it's very often with a malicious motivation, but it can be a helpful tool for coping with your own stuff.
This reminds me of this Buddhist story about the cup that is already broken. I think I like this a bit better, as it's not that the cup doesn't matter, but rather enjoying it for what it is while you have it.
A monk had a beautiful, delicate tea cup.
His student asked him about the cup. And much to the student's surprise he replied that the cup is already broken. “What do you mean?” – asked the student.
The monk said – “To me this cup is already broken.”
“I enjoy it. I drink from it. It holds my water admirably – sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put it on the shelf and the winds blows it over or I knock it off the table and it shatters on the ground then I say - of course.
When I understand the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
Great story. It's a stepping stone to understanding fully that we are all going to die and that life itself is precious.
IMO, its not dark.
How I perceived it, Epictetus wants to say: things happen and you are on a spectrum of emotions based on the context (in case of death, how close you were to the person), try to minimize the length of the spectrum.
I agree in part. You could read Epictetus as saying "just try not caring about people," which I think is the incorrect reading. Instead, I think he's saying something like "take a step back and realize that your deep personal attachments don't look so important when you step outside your perspective. You can use this realization to help get past the deep emotional pain that is normal for people to feel."
However, the line about other's indifference I think can only be read as dark funny to a modern reader:
> has someone else's child or wife died? There's no one who wouldn't say 'So it goes.'
Our environment is simply far less brutal. This is closely aligned to the mentality of people in war torn countries, to the present day.
Actually when one is old enough, the lethality around becomes much more visible.
This is true and no one thinks about it until they reach 50-70
Either everyone you know dies 1 by 1, or you do.
The world being indifferent to your pain is not helping if you're in acute pain. Step outside your perspective, sure. I guarantee you this will not work if you have real issues like physical pain due to terminal cancer.
You should read "A Man's Search for Meaning" sometime. While not exactly Stoicism many of the ideas are similar/related. How a person views and responds to their situation, has a huge impact on them. No one is saying any of this will remove all of someone's acute pain, but as crazy as it sounds, accepting that suffering can lead maybe the pain not being quite so bad.
It is the teaching of acceptable of impermanence also found in Buddhism and other eastern lineages.
Maybe it was intentionally funny, maybe not.
But imagining oneself from a third perspective has a therapeutic effect that you can't really explain in words. You just do it and it's deeply soothing somehow.
As I get older, I read this entirely differently (as an appeal to empathy) than I did when I was younger (as an appeal to stolidity).
In other words, you should be pained for your neighbor when his slave breaks his cup. Maybe his grandmother left him that cup, and he's developed many fond memories around which he drank a soothing beverage in that heirloom. That empathy how we connect with people, build meaning, and make life richer.
That's probably not how the stoics meant it though.
My initial reaction was to disagree, but the man did allegedly take in an abandoned infant. And a woman to care for it[1]. And, our readings[2] of that quote (acceptance vs altruism) aren't in any way incompatible.
[1] You absolutely don't want to be a single woman in 1st century AD.
[2] acceptance vs altruism
From just the quote above, I understand more as something intermediate : don't be pained when your cup is broken, like if it it was the cup of some else but be pained when someone else wife or child die, like if it was your
• Pop stoicism is an anesthetic for the powerless.
• Classical stoicism was an anesthetic for the powerful.
• Both suppress the self in service of an external system.
• Neither are about empathy.
What treatment of the slave does the broken cup’s provenance justify?
He was a slave at some point, right? Maybe he was just trying to get people to chill out about their cups, to save some of his former peers an unpleasant time.
It's about accepting the bad things that will inevitably happen to us. "Loving your wife" and "grieving when she dies" are two separate things. We need mental framing that does not connect them, even though our default settings are to do so. Or at least that's how I'm reading it.
> You should feel the same about your wife or child as someone else's.
I don't see why it should be so.
It makes perfect sense to sympathize(?) and understand that somebody is grieving and is likely going through pain/emotions that I would have gone through if my wife/child has died. But that is not the same thing as me feeling those emotions.
Isn't this the distinction between empathy and sympathy?
They were pointing out the implication in the source material but not agreeing with it.
I don't see this as particularly dark or particularly funny. Seems like good advice. Most of our negative emotions are a waste of time and energy. I always try to see things in the greater context of the world: all things are brief, beautiful, and utterly without meaning in the greater scheme of things. If I spend a ton of time wailing and grinding my teeth about shit then I'm just wasting time I could be using to enjoy the experience of being alive.
> Most of our negative emotions are a waste of time and energy.
In a different frame, most of our negative emotions are there to help us - by signifying that something is wrong. You could be thankful for having them so that you are prompted to investigate what's wrong. It's only when we forget that feelings are only a part of our experience and start to identify with feelings (positive and negative) that trouble arises.
I really mean that wallowing in our negative emotions is a waste of time and energy.
I think that’s the wrong takeaway - the point is that when it’s happening to someone else, it’s easier to see the ‘right’ attitude to take regarding misfortune.
Of course it’s awful to have your child die, but also it’s fairly commonly understood, that it can’t be the end of your life as well, you take the time you need to grieve, and then you go on living. “So it goes.”
The point with the cup is the same: it’s easier to council patience and forgiveness when your lap isn’t soaked with wine, when shards of your cup don’t litter the floor.
It’s demonstrating a route to removing yourself from the emotion of the present situation, to examine things rationally, dispassionately, like you would if they were happening to someone else, because it’s easier to see the right thing to do that way.
I wonder how evolutionary fit such indifference really is. It can, of course, be way too much as well as too little.
It simply doesn't work, even assuming you had no empathy as described in the quote.
I think if we did the opposite, where we imagine we are the same person as other people in various situations, I think we would be overcome with debilitating pain, unable to function and just curling up into a ball and crying all day.
Some people hold this view not by choice, but by biology. In clinical terms it’s associated with psychopathy, or antisocial personality disorder if you prefer more neutral language. These individuals can perform acts that would emotionally devastate most people while experiencing little to no internal response. Importantly, the vast majority of psychopaths are not violent criminals or serial killers.
This isn’t speculative philosophy. Psychopathy is a well-studied area of psychology and neuroscience, and we can identify brain patterns that allow clinicians to assess psychopathy with a high probability of being correct. This gives us something close to a real-world example of the “perfect stoic,” taken to an extreme beyond what any philosophy actually advocates. What’s striking is that psychopathy is strongly associated not with superior functioning, but with impulsivity, poor long-term planning, and difficulty integrating into society.
The takeaway is uncomfortable but important: emotions are not merely noise that interferes with rationality. They function as behavioral guardrails. Remove them entirely and pure logic alone is insufficient to regulate behavior in a social world. Without those constraints, people don’t become hyper-rational idealists. They become unstable, maladaptive, and conspicuously out of place.
I think the main reason is that social behavior is not rational as a first-order effect. It is irrational at the local level and only becomes rational indirectly, sometimes as a side effect of a side effect.
For example, if I see someone on the street who has just been stabbed, the strictly first-order rational response is to ignore it and keep walking. Helping costs time, energy, and introduces personal risk. From a narrow perspective, conserving resources dominates. Why spend calories calling an ambulance when ignoring it is cheaper?
The second- or third-order effects are where things change. Someone might see you help and treat you differently later, or the person you helped might repay you in some way. But in any single instance, those payoffs are unlikely. Most of the time you get nothing. Likewise, any stigma for not helping can evaporate quickly. People have short memories.
The real effect shows up in aggregate. If you consistently apply this kind of extreme local rationality minute to minute, people notice. Over time, patterns form. You are perceived as cold, unreliable, or unsafe to depend on, and you are gradually shunned. It’s not even the second-order effects that matter most, but the cumulative aggregation of them.
This is where evolution matters. Natural selection is the ultimate trial-based selector. It does not care about what is logically defensible in a single instance. It selects for strategies that survive repeated interaction with reality over long time horizons.
But selection does not operate only at the level of isolated individuals. Humans evolved in groups, and many traits exist specifically to regulate group dynamics. Emotions such as empathy, guilt, shame, and moral outrage function not just to guide personal behavior, but to coordinate groups and enforce norms. They create alignment without requiring explicit calculation.
Just as importantly, groups evolve mechanisms to identify and prune individuals who don’t internalize those constraints. Someone who consistently defects, exploits, or optimizes locally at the expense of others may do fine in isolated interactions, but over time they are marked, excluded, or expelled. This pruning is not moral. It is functional. Groups that fail to do it collapse under free-riding and mistrust.
Seen through this lens, emotions are not optional. They are load-bearing components of social systems. They bias individuals toward cooperation and simultaneously give groups tools to detect and remove those who can’t or won’t play by the same rules.
Natural selection already ran this experiment at scale. Psychopathy illustrates what happens when these mechanisms are weakened or absent. What remains is not a superior form of rationality, but a system that optimizes locally, destabilizes its environment, and ultimately selects itself out.
In that context, stoicism is best understood not as a prescription to remove emotion, but as an attempt to discipline it. Whether it succeeds depends on how narrowly or literally it is interpreted. Taken as emotional suppression or pure rational control, it collapses into the same failure modes already visible in the clinical and evolutionary evidence. Taken more loosely, it functions less as a truth about human behavior and more as a coping framework with limited scope.
I can’t help but think that the rise in stoicisms popularity among manosphere types because it lets them repackage a lot of more undesirable masculine traits under a legitimate label— You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
Whether those traits a “real stoicism” or not doesn’t matter, because that’s the way it gets spread through TikTok length discourse
I think that’s more a critique of the modern caricature of stoicism than of Stoicism itself. Classical Stoicism isn’t about suppressing emotions. It’s about understanding your emotions, examining where they come from, and choosing how you respond rather than being ruled by them.
I think this is the most concisely accurate description of Stoicism I've yet seen; well done.
Also it's about learning to distinguish between stuff we can influence vs stuff we cannot. Like I cannot influence if the sun rises tomorrow or not, so there's not point in worrying about it
understanding, examining and choosing are all thinking based. and that's why stoicism isn't really working well for humans. emotions are neuropsychologically lower level than thoughts/logic/ratio. having said that, lectures about stoicism might well be excellent instructions for language models on how to handle communication with humans.
Part of practicing Stoicism is to bring emotions up to the understanding, examining, and choosing level. You still have emotions, but you don't let them control you.
I love JiuJitsu because many parts of it are like microcosms of life. The first time someone lays on you and you feel like you can't breath, you panic. That's an emotion. After a few times you realize you can breath and eventually you will feel the panic and instead of succumbing, it'll wash past you. By practicing feeling emotions, especially negative ones like being uncomfortable over and over, eventually they move into your higher level thinking and no longer control you. You absolutely still have them, but your reaction to them has changed.
It's more to separate the feeling from the reaction to the feeling by a layer of understanding & examination. Feel first, understand the feeling, examine whether the feeling is appropriate for the situation that caused it, determine how to react, react. It's an OODA loop applied to one's own emotions: Observe the feeling, Orient on the situation, Decide on a response, Act as decided. If you pre-decide to always suppress any reaction you're missing the point. Stoicism is quite similar to modern Cognitive Behavior Therapy. If you just react without thinking you'll often react to your learned habits rather than the actual situation at hand.
And now that I've read that the second time, this is very close to various kinds of therapy.
For example, anxiety exists and sometimes occurs, and it means parts of me are trying to be very careful and precise about something. This can be a problem at times if it overcomes you, but it can also be leveraged into a strength once you figure why it's flaring up at the moment.
Another example, travel used to be a nuisance, but now I've setup and continue refining some packing and preparation checklists for trips of varying length. Now it's a big no-brainer to be well-prepared for a short work-trip and I'm usually very calm about it.
"Just suck it up and power through"
I don't feel that is a "undesirable masculine trait", I live by that and still "feel things" and have emotions.
One thing that's worth noting is that Epictetus himself was a slave, and I think it's informed a lot of his thoughts. For him, true freedom is being able to overcome the events of the world. You may not be able to control whether or not you're a slave, but (to Epictetus) you can control how you feel about being a slave, and that is true freedom.
ie, he saw the world as full of misery and difficulty, and saw modifying your internal experience as the only possible path forward.
Huh, I never saw it that way but it makes sense. I guess the cruelest thing to do to Epictetus would then be to make him believe he could be anything other than a slave, if only he worked hard enough. Oh...
Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world and adopted the same outlook. there were people along the whole spectrum between slave and emperor who also did.
It's not "suck it up and move on", it's "accept the reality as starting point and do what's possible, with calm clear mind"
Memento mori. Death is inevitable but worrying constantly about it, whether your own or your loved ones, is no way to live.
As I get older and as my parents get older I take comfort from that.
That slave mindset is not good, though. It's not about not having feelings. It's about ignoring your feelings.
Why do your opinions not matter?
Conversely, why should they matter? I'm not saying they shouldn't but I think it's worth pondering.
Even better, where did you get the opinions? are they definitely your own, did you choose them from all available options by picking the ones that were best for you, or did you passively absorb them from people who can profit from giving you those opinions?
This is the exact phrasing I was just searching for, and I fear the same thing that this pop stoicism revival is trying to formalize some really asocial behaviors.
It's not just pop stoicism. For years now it seems to me that a lot of memes regarding personal conduct spread on social media that essentially try to dress up toxic behavior in a positive light and encourage it.
I'm aware that society had these same sorts of issues prior to social media but it's still depressing watching it play out.
Reminds of “We belief something first, and then we pick our reasons for it.”
People aren’t really engaging with their philosophy (“love of wisdom”) but pick and choose so it reinforces what they already believe. They don’t exactly think about it they stay mildly glossing some concepts in the popular amateur/ social media sphere.
In some ways I always wonder if this Build-A-Bear thingy we've developed in the last 100 or so years regarding spirituality, morals, principles and all that as an alternative to traditional religious practices isn't just as lame as what it's meant to replace but in its own kind.
I'm not advocating for religious institutions or theocracy, mind you, I'm trying to formulate an argument how someone talking about how living life in accordance to Stoics on YouTube or Christ in a church is more of an aesthetics issue than a virtue one.
Though I feel by the time I successfully formulate that argument I'll have multiple groups clamoring for my head.
"undesirable masculine traits" haha
Who un-desires them? You?
I’m tired of the whole “toxic masculinity” framing.
First, it’s sloppy. Plenty of genuinely harmful traits exist, but trying to pin them to “masculine” or “feminine” archetypes is more ideology than analysis. If the problem is bad behavior, just call it bad behavior. Adding a gender label doesn’t improve clarity, it just adds noise.
Second, it’s selectively applied. Many traits that are equally destructive are rarely labeled at all, usually because they’re expressed indirectly or through social maneuvering rather than overt force. That doesn’t make them less harmful, just harder to name without breaking the narrative.
More broadly, labeling a negative trait as inherently “masculine” is simply rude and unnecessary. “Undesirable traits” works fine and doesn’t require turning half the population into a rhetorical prop.
As a non-toxic and extremely moral male biological specimen, I’ll just note that attaching moral failure to the male gender category feels oddly out of step with modern norms around inclusivity. It’s as vile and disgusting as referring to a person by the wrong pronoun.
I think you should understand the terms as "toxic masculinity" as opposed to "positive masculinity". It's not saying masculinity is toxic. Or if you want, as opposed to "true masculinity" - reframing masculinity as a positive thing when expressed correctly.
In practice, the term is never used this way. It's used as a cudgel.
citations needed. (give five examples).
Why do undesirable or desirable behaviours need a sex/gender label at all? Asshole behaviour isn't gender-specific. Maybe people should just focus on criticizing specific undesirable behaviours, and praising specific desirable behaviours.
The group of traits often described by "toxic masculinity" are overwhelmingly displayed only by males, so... it makes sense?
If you aren't someone who displays that specific bundle of traits/behaviors, I would suggest being stoic about it and not taking the term personally.
If you replaced "males" in that sentence with ... well, let's be honest here, pretty much any other category, the statement would likely be deemed entirely unacceptable and the comment censored (ie [flagged][dead]) in short order.
Regardless of how the statistics for that specific set of behaviors break down my personal experience is that both the application and acceptance of such terminology (ie referring to various sets of behaviors which it might make sense to group together based on whatever metric) is highly selective in a manner that's convenient for the party expressing it. The statement is often true but the grouping superfluous, included only (seemingly) to push an agenda.
In this specific discussion, the traits labelled as toxic masculinity were as follows:
> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
The person who most embodies these traits for me, in my life, is...my mum. I don't view them as exclusively toxic any more than I view them as exclusively masculine, either. Sometimes you really do just choose to hug your kids even when they were aggravating little twits five minutes ago and you're still mad at them, and that's a good thing.
The term is overused. Females have extremely toxic behavior as well. But the term toxic feminist is not used to label them. It’s nowhere near as extreme.
The world does not lack terms to describe any feminine behavior, toxic or otherwise, so I don't think this is a real problem.
Can you use those terms in polite company though?
It's strange. Clearly at some point society at large came to believe that the current crop of terms at the time was undesirable. Yet various modern analogues are treated differently.
But there is no corresponding discussion of "toxic femininity", or if there is, it is that discussion is framed as more "toxic masculinity" from the "manosphere".
It's a term used to apply guilt across all males to subvert any actual debate.
Crime is also overwhelmingly associated with race. Intelligence quotient as well. We don’t characterize race by statistical facts because we would offend the outliers.
I think it’s important to follow etiquette in common language rather then label entire minorities or groups based off of statistics.
> Crime is also overwhelmingly associated with race.
Race or poverty?
Toxic masculinity doesn’t mean men are poisonous.
It means men are being poisoned.
It's funny because while I believe the concept of toxic masculinity is absolutely badly used in general, and should be seen with suspicion, here is one of the real examples it makes sense to use it. There absolutely people (Andrew rate is one of the most famous) that prey on the weaknesses and toxic aspects of masculinity (you have also the same for female weaknesses and toxicity)
I use the term not for traits and behaviours I think are masculine, but are sold as being masculine, which are toxic. An example would be that it's masculine to not cry or show emotions (whereas woman are labeled as "emotional"). Suppressing emotions is nothing gender specific of course, but when certain groups promote that as "masculine", calling that "toxic masculinity" makes sense IMO.
I still think this is where the framing quietly breaks down.
What you’re describing is not “masculinity” being toxic, but a particular sales pitch that smuggles bad norms under the masculinity label. Historically, this is exactly how language like “that’s so gay” operated. People didn’t mean “homosexual” in any literal sense. They meant weak, unserious, emotionally incontinent, indulgent. If pressed, the defense was always the same: I’m not talking about gay people, I’m talking about the stereotype society wrongly attaches to them.
The move is familiar because it works rhetorically. You get to criticize a behavior while outsourcing the moral weight to an identity category. The identity absorbs the stain, even if everyone insists that’s not what they meant.
We’ve seen this pattern over and over: “Real men don’t cry.” “Be a man” meaning suppress emotion, not develop discipline. “That’s gay” meaning fragile or contemptible. “Masculine energy” marketed as dominance without responsibility. “Feminine energy” marketed as intuition without accountability.
In every case, the failure isn’t gendered. It’s human. But the label does the work of making it feel natural to aim the critique at a group rather than the behavior itself.
This is why the analogy matters. Society eventually realized that using “gay” as a stand-in for negative traits was lazy at best and corrosive at worst, even when people swore they weren’t talking about actual gay people. The word still carried the freight.
I’m just applying the same standard here, as a proud champion of masculinity and part-time custodian of its reputation.
If the problem is emotional suppression, call it emotional suppression. If the problem is social pressure to perform invulnerability, call that out. If the problem is dominance without accountability, say so plainly.
Masculinity, like femininity, is a broad distribution of traits, not a slogan. Strength and restraint. Risk-taking and responsibility. Stoicism and emotional regulation. The pathologies show up when any of those lose balance, not because they’re “masculine.”
We spent decades correctly arguing that femininity itself wasn’t the problem, only the caricatures imposed on it. I’m simply extending that courtesy to masculinity, which seems overdue.
As a non-toxic, extremely moral male biological specimen and self-appointed advocate for masculine dignity, I’m fully in favor of men crying, feeling, and communicating. I just don’t think masculinity needs to be rhetorically sacrificed to achieve that outcome.
If anything, masculinity should be defended, rehabilitated, and held to a higher standard, not permanently prefixed with an asterisk.
> ... As a non-toxic, extremely moral male biological specimen and self-appointed advocate for masculine dignity, I’m fully in favor of men crying, feeling, and communicating. ...
The whole point is that men communicating about their inner emotions and feelings have to learn to be extremely diplomatic about it, lest their communication be misinterpreted by others (intentionally or not!) as them just freaking out and throwing an angry temper tantrum. Men have responsibilities to those around them that ultimately require developing strong discipline and keeping their emotions under check, at least to a very significant extent. This is what the whole notion of "toxic masculinity/femininity/whatever" is getting at; ultimately, uncontrolled anger and other negative emotions can be a whole lot more toxic than simple emotional restraint.
> As a non-toxic and extremely moral male biological specimen, I’ll just note that attaching moral failure to the male gender category feels oddly out of step with modern norms around inclusivity. It’s as vile and disgusting as referring to a person by the wrong pronoun.
This would read like satire in most places besides HN
That's so far away from what stoic practice is. Is that really what TikTok tells you?
As someone who has been interested in actual Stoicism for years, yes, there is a whole industry of people monetizing cherry-picked bullet points to serve up what people already want to hear. The fact it all comes with a less-than-subtle sheen of "Western Thought" widens the audience to not just men who don't think real good, but also racists. Happily, now that can be accelerated with AI as we simultaneously remove actual Greek philosophers from college entirely!
I would love to sit back with some quotation from Marcus Aurelius about how it's not anything I have to worry about, but that's the part I never quite bought into with Stoicism I suppose. So ignore all of the above.
I got interested a few years back thanks to Derren Brown's book "Happy" (recommended). I have found it helpful. I can't say I actually do any of the exercises, but it has slightly reframed how I think about my own wellbeing and happiness.
edit: I've missed all this new bite sized version stuff though precisely because I avoid bite size stuff like the plague. TikTok and the TikTokification of everything else can fuck right off. I'm looking at you, YouTube.
The modern/online resurgence of stoicism isn’t driven by people that have studied actual books.
It’s being driven by people that are making tiktoks after they learned about it by watching a five minute YouTube video. It’s a very lossy game of telephone.
Pop philosophy being turned into AI audio transcribed by a cool video game character (also being mostly AI generated) is clearly the crowning jewel of our civilization.
Where can I find this AI generated cool video game character spewing out pop philosophy? Sounds like fun!
Only because Freud and Jung fell out of fashion, these TikToks are the pop-psychology books of yesteryear.
Well that's pretty depressing, I had no idea.
No, the new wave of popularity for Stoicism can be traced back to Tom Wolfe's 1998 bestseller, A Man in Full. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tom-Wolfe-s-Book-A-Man-i...
> I can’t help but think that the stoicism is so popular among manosphere type
Is it actually though?
In the past I've been trying to adopt the stoic mindset, but always struggled. But I continued to read and learn about it.
Unrelatedly, I came across a recomendation for David Burns "Feeling Good" here on hackernews a couple of years ago.
Reading it with my interest in stoicism in mind, I honestly found it to be probably the best modern day handbook to actually adopting the stoic mindset - without ever mentioning it.
As far as I understand stoicism, it is all about seeing things as they are, and understanding that the only thing that we really control is our reaction / interpretation of events. And the CBT approach that is explained in Feeling Good/Feeling Great is exactly how you do this.
With this perspective Marcus Aurelius Meditations suddenly make a lot more sense. They are his therapy homework.
If anyone Googles it and is wondering about Feeling Good (1999) and Feeling Great (2020) by the same author, it seems like Feeling Great is just an updated version of the original book, based on more experience and new insights. Here's the author discussing the difference:
https://feelinggood.com/2020/10/26/213-from-feeling-good-to-...
Love that book. It changed my life.
A lot of comments here use this metaphor of emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed or they will accumulate and explode. I think this can be traced to pop-psychology bullshit, and there isn't any neuroscientific basis backing it up. It seems like wishful thinking by people who like expressing their emotions to others and want to justify their spend on therapists, or their occasional emotional outbursts.
Instead, the evidence points to the brain building habits around emotions and their regulation the same way it builds habits around everything else. If you practice not feeling emotions or becoming identified with them, then that habit will continue and they will become easier to not feel. There is not a debt to be paid, or a buildup to be released.
This is often framed in different ways, mediators talk about "creating distance" and "noticing but not indulging". The timeless grug-brain approach is "ignoring", described by emotional people as "bottling up". These are different ways to frame the same phenomenon, which is that the brain does what it has practiced.
A Stoic would say that negative emotions have root causes in the misconceptions you hold about how the world works, and what you can and cannot affect about it. If you don't proactively address those root causes (which doesn't require "expressing" the emotion, but does require noticing and judging it without reflexive acceptance) the negativity will in fact "keep flowing" and your short-term disregard of it will be less and less effective.
It's not a good "habit" to disregard negative emotions without also examining them.
>emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed
Yes, this does seem to be the assumption that many are (uncritically?) making. I wonder where this idea comes from. Anyone know the provenance of this? Has this concept been handed down from antiquity? Or Jung or Freud or ? Or is this something relatively modern?
I recently spent time on Stoicism Week 2025: https://modernstoicism.com/stoic-week-2025-live-like-a-stoic...
This years theme was on well-being, I found it useful.
Stoics always think they are above caring about stupid shit, but that's the fun of life. The last sentence of Nietzsche's quote is completely right.
While it isn't expressly stoic, I'm liking the gray rock tactic more and more as I age. You can just not fight the people who are rude to you and not engage with ideas that frustrate you. When you reduce your personal connections to what you have direct control over and your actual responsibility, the need to argue with most people is very low.
I like the moral part of Stoicism a lot, and even though the original texts are slightly morbid, the core idea makes perfect logical sense. You can't fully control things outside of your mind, and when you try to control them, you suffer (e.g. you don't want to get sick, but you will, you don't want to get old , but you will)
What I struggled with was applying this "logical understanding" to my day-to-day life. In other words, the recommended practice of morning and evening meditation was always too early and too late, respectively. I needed to have tools to use in the difficult moments directly.
I recently discovered Acceptance Commitment Therapy - It's an interesting mix of mindfulness and living in accordance with your values. If you also struggle to bring the stoic teachings to your minute-by-minute life, give the book "ACT made simple" a try.
There are differences.. Stoic teaching would have you analyse the thought (impression) and discard it as something out of your control. Whilst ACT will have you accept that the thought exists, but not identify with it. Stoics give you the values (virtues), ACT lets you pick them. But all in all, those two approaches are complementary.
Ada Palmer has a great blog post on why Stocism is so appealing to rich folks. Her writing is always excellent.
https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powe...
Stoicism has always struck me as cognitive behavioural therapy (specifically the cognitive triangle) but for boys who think therapy is for women and is rife for misuse from people who don't understand it.
I understand stoicism is deeply entwined with modern CBT and the roots can be traced back basically, but why misuse the ancient form when we have decades of evolution and study on CBT?
I think a lot of modern day stoicism is stoicism-without-hardship. And I think hardship is necessary for stoicism - otherwise all you have is determined detachment, which is something else entirely.
Ton arrière-arrière grand-père a vécus la grosse misère ton arrière grand-pere il ramassait des cennes noires et pis ton grand-pere miracle est devenue millionaires ton pere en na hériter il a toute mit dans ses réer et pis toé tite jeunesse tu doit ton cul au ministaire. pas moyen davoir. un prés dans une intitustion banquaire. pour calmer tes envie de huldoper la cassière tu lit des livre qui parle ... de simplicité vonlontaire
- I think each generation can have a different reason for adopting any philosophy it’s about whether it serves you or not.
> Any misfortune ‘that lies outside the sphere of choice’ should be considered an opportunity to strengthen our resolve, not an excuse to weaken it.
This is a solid reframe that has helped me in difficult times: any bad luck turned from a setback/obstacle to an empowering stepping stone to the next level.
I don't know how much the modern take on stoicism diverges from its historical origins, but I'm among those who believe that it ultimately pumps a delusion: that one can solve mind aches with mind hacks. Contemplative mystics (e.g. Zen, Dao) can recognize in stoicism some elemental truths --mainly that our emotions tend to be driven by the fiction created by thoughts--, but they also see it as incomplete at best and at worst, just another misguided attempt at trusting the mind as a solution architect to the problems that it creates, which often results in other subtler problems like bypassing.
Such traditions don't practice control or avoidance of emotions, but rather use them as teaching devices through aware observation when they manifest in experience (bodily sensations and thoughts). Through this "witnessing" there's realization of their fundamental nature, along with surrendering and integration of shadow elements. On the surface the result may appear the same as what stoicism purports to give you, but there's a radical difference. Where stoicism aims for thought-driven control, mystics know there's none to be found and instead encourage to trust in and to reconnect with our intuitive nature. Allow pain, feel it fully, let it go, and return in the flow.
If you're not into mysticism, but are interested in this kind of work for the practical purpose of navigating your experience of life with less suffering, here's a secular curriculum: start with some embodiment practice (contemplation in bodily sensations, yoga nidra, body scan meditations, soft butter meditations, Tai Chi, Qigong, any physical activity done with heightened awareness of the body), find a good teacher or therapist to guide you into Shadow Work, supplement with regular Trauma and Tension Release Exercises (TRE), sprinkle some Loving Kindness meditations to take things to another level. Do this and you won't just look the part, you'll feel it to your core.
> Where stoicism aims for thought-driven control, mystics know there's none to be found and instead encourage to trust in and to reconnect with our intuitive nature. Allow pain, feel it fully, let it go, and return in the flow.
The idea that thought is also ultimately driven by intuitions is one that stoics would've been quite familiar with. Part of the problem here is a definitional matter: should we restrict our view solely to the negative emotions, or admit that a positive "spirit" also exists in us that's ultimately just as intuitive and emotional? There isn't one single answer AIUI; both views are useful for different purposes, but it's true that a more "mystical" point of view could lead us to the latter. Some of the Stoics do talk about notions like "the good and bad daimon (or genius)" in ways that might somehow hint at the same reality, even though these intuitions are quite hard to understand in a modern context.
Mel Robins' popular "Let Them Theory" captures some of the sentiment of Stoicism.
https://www.melrobbins.com/book/the-let-them-theory/
Key phrase "captures some of the sentiment of Stoicism". Her book could be cut down to about ten pages.
If Books Could Kill reviewed her book in April 2025:
"Peter and Michael discuss The Let Them Theory, a self-help guide to seeking bliss through unmitigated complacency."
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2RupLQH4eBnUX4mo1zAAFz?si=h...
> Her book could be cut down to about ten pages.
Should I understand that to be a critique?
I'm more of a zen and taoism kind of person.
Anger is an energy
My journey with stoicism has been useful and powerful at every phase, but for future and fellow walkers of this path I leave advice:
You you a mindful stoic or a dissociated one?
I'd argue dissociation, at least in the short term, is a critical part of the process. To not let the gut reactions carry you away. You do often need to realize, those reactions are still often happening. You body does it's own thing and you need to be mindful when it does that. Fear, shock, anxiety, elation, they all happen even if you keep a clear conscious mind. The in the situation, the work is in correcting for the biases they give.
In the medium term, if you aren't going back and holding the emotions you set aside, you are doing it wrong. Stoicism sells as "magical no emotion land" but you are flesh and flesh has emotions. Both reasonable and unreasonable. You job is to manage and integrate them effectively.
Stoicism is a good toolkit for managing and analyzing emotions, but if you don't add going back and feeling those emotions to the tools, you are just a timebomb running an emotional debt and dissociating from it. I've done that, and watched others do the same. Odds are this message won't actually change things if you are there right now, but maybe it will nudge you in the right direction.
> In the medium term, if you aren't going back and holding the emotions you set aside, you are doing it wrong. Stoicism sells as "magical no emotion land" but you are flesh and flesh has emotions. Both reasonable and unreasonable. You job is to manage and integrate them effectively.
I think it's helpful not to identify with your emotions. You may experience emotions, but you are not your emotions. That's the difference between saying "I'm angry" and "I feel anger arising within me."
I guess what I don't get about this is: couldn't you apply the same mode to other internal states? "I understand this," vs "I feel understanding arising in me?"
Maybe that is good, now that I write it out. I think "understanding" is actually a pretty dumb mental state to invest a lot in.
That is a dissociating mode, a more mindful one, but still intentionally distancing yourself from your experiences. It works great for improving your perception of yourself and being mindful. Its a meditation.
It also isn't really available in a crisis, in the moment. All our long term work is really to train the anxious idiot part of ourselves who runs the show most of the time how to cope with what the world and body are doing right now. That person is very much connected to their emotions, no matter what story we make up about it. You need practice being that person feeling those emotions as well as practice analyzing them.
> but if you don't add going back and feeling those emotions to the tools, you are just a timebomb running an emotional debt and dissociating from it
What would that entail? I can't imagine e.g. taking some time on Sunday afternoon to feel that panic I suppressed from the crisis on Monday.
> I can't imagine e.g. taking some time on Sunday afternoon to feel that panic I suppressed from the crisis on Monday.
Almost literally that. Revisit the moments that made you "suppress" things. Think of it as a post-mortem. It won't be the same, an echo distorted by time and distance, But pay attention to what you set aside. Suppressing emotions is the short term hack. The ideal is to be able to have them and still be centered. Only way to get better at that is practice.
A bit similar to "Expect the worst, hope for the best"
I always expect a reversion to the mean and hope I'm right.
Stoicism is like recommending having a couple drinks ( literally ) to a "normal" person with mild social anxiety with a need to go out in the World and live life.
It works and it's good advice.
Unfortunately it gets recommended to everybody at every point in their lives, which include alcoholics and people in crisis.
In a more direct way: Stop with this "no emotion" "I'm a fortress" bullshit. It only helps a narrow group of people in specific circumstances of their lives but wreaks havoc on everybody else because it's misplaced and mostly a lie or at least a very incomplete picture.
Very well put!
Samkhya Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya) gives a far more comprehensive model to analytically go beyond the three sources of suffering (viz. from own body/mind, from other beings/things, from acts of god).
You can then think of specific practices from Buddhism eg. Tibetan Lojong - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojong - and Stoicism as applications within that framework.
PS: Keith Seddon's Epictetus' Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes: Guides to Stoic Living is one of the best books in stoic literature. - https://www.routledge.com/Epictetus-Handbook--and-the-Tablet...
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, what use is the rule?”
The primary thing many who follow Stoicism do is tell people how much Stoicism they’re doing.
Every time I see someone espousing Stoicism I never think to myself “I would love to be like that guy”.
These two things together make it seem like it’s just a viral meme. The male equivalent of the TikTok insistence that they won’t date anyone who “doesn’t go to therapy”.
My favourite part of stoicism is needing to use the example of an emperor ruling over people trying to stay grounded as he can given the unfortunate circumstances of being the ruler of everything as the way forward for every average man to deeply relate to.
Stoicism has its definite positives, but balancing the privileged emperor is always worth being mindful and expressive of.
I used to be a fan, it entirely ruined CBT for me - you can only gaslight yourself so well into ignoring emotional compass and I think I maxed it out before encountering CBT approach.
My absolute favorite (this is irony) form of stoicism in the modern era is when a company director paid some multiple of your salary sends a daily stoic quote to everyone in the organization that amounts to telling people to work longer hours and accept more abuse and to shut up about not getting even cost-of-living raises because they should be grateful that they're employed at all. Should people be grateful for employment? Mmmmm....debatable. Should that be the chosen form of interaction from a position of imbalanced power? My fucking god, no. Try being slightly less of a sociopath.
Since the Covid theater, Stoicism is everywhere: that's why I don't read about it anymore because wherever the mass and Pavlov dogs head, the truth is elsewhere.
That's kind of a narrow take; the mainstream may be directed towards a good thing and just not have the depth to draw a benefit, its attention being superficial and fleeting.
E.g. the Pavlovian dog metaphor is quite a mainstream trope, but doesn't it carry an important message nevertheless?
If anything, I would say that fleeting takes and offhand dismissals are what determines and solidifies the mainstream's superficiality.
My whole comment refers to the "Propaganda" book by Edward Bernays.
If you always walk in the opposite direction of the crowd you are still letting them control where you go.
> Stockdale rejected the false optimism proffered by Christianity, because he knew, from direct observation, that false hope is how you went insane in that prison.
With all due respect to Stockdale, I wonder what definition of "Christianity" he had in mind. Historic, biblical Christianity doesn't make delusive promises to palliate suffering by implying that it will be brief or underwhelming. Just read the depths that David was brought to in the Psalms, or Job's experience, or the Apostle Paul's. Look at the thousands upon thousands of steeled and joyful Christian martyrs under the persecution by the Roman empire.
Rather the Scriptures again and again plainly tell us to expect suffering - but the remedy goes far deeper than a mere Stoical submission to an impersonal logos in nature. Suffering, contrary to the Stoics, is not natural - to pretend that it is goes against our deepest sensibilities and experience. Rather the Scriptures explain the reason for suffering - it is due to living in a world that is experiencing the consequences of rebellion against its Creator. It should hurt, and denying this places us in an inevitable contradiction.
The Stoics may argue this isn't much different than their own philosophy - both recognize it's a reality one way or another after all. However, Christianity goes on and ascends far higher, both subjectively and objectively. Both speak of the Logos, but the Logos of Christianity is far more than a distant, abstract principle. He is the one who cannot suffer, but who entered into this world of suffering through the Incarnation to redeem men by suffering more than any of them ever will.
Thus Christianity presents a realist's view of suffering - it is common, deep, often bewildering. But Christians _are_ to submit to it as for their ultimate good. Like the Stoic, the Christian accepts it as a refiners fire:
> My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
But unlike the Stoic, the Christian sees the source of it is far more personal, and will bring him to a far greater victory and joy than the best of the Stoics every could achieve.
> For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. ... And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. ... Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
I can understand the draw to Stoicism felt by many today, and respect the movement in many ways, but I think the neo-Stoics overlook a greater philosophy, one which eventually drew in vast numbers of Stoics seeking a better way.
You really have to already be privileged, and not directly affected by these so-called “external causes” the author talks about, to be able to take comfort in ignoring them. But is that even desirable? Do we actually want to live in a society where the privileged ignore other people’s problems simply because they can? Is it even acceptable to say: “A fascist militia (ICE) kills a lesbian woman for no reason other than the fact that she is lesbian, but since I’m not the one targeted by ICE, I should disconnect from social media, turn off the TV, and ignore this injustice”?
Not only can external problems that affect our mental health serve as a driving force for action—because it is possible to organize and fight against the causes of these injustices—but in addition, inaction in the face of what is initially “external” inevitably leads to a point where we ourselves become affected by those same injustices.
I want to quote a sermon by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, who spoke precisely about this:
> First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Communist. > > Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Socialist. > > Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Trade Unionist. > > Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Jew. > > Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Yawn I am so over stoicism being the philosophy du jour. I shouldn't be surprised, since it's stony individualism aligns extremely well with the amoral and increasingly draconian imperatives of unbridled, self-interested capital (I guess one could write a book on this), but man seeing it constantly referenced in dumbed down contentless rehashing of the surface level engagements one could have with a body of thought in all this popular media is becoming so tiring.
If you're actually interested in stoicism I highly encourage picking up books by some actual scholars.
While stoicism was not invented by Marcus Aurelius the particular flavor referred to these days was and let’s be absolutely clear what it was:
Stoicism was Aurelius ways to justify mass death and conquering of an empire while creating a mental patterns that roughly said “don’t worry too much about.”
Did you actually ever read something by Aurelius?
Happiness only comes from the achievement of values. The greatest bamboozlement of stoicism is teaching people to be indifferent to achieving their values. It lobotomizes upside gains in a world that's full of opportunity to a mind of reason.
> teaching people to be indifferent to achieving their values
That's inaccurate. Stoicism teaches indifference to outcomes you don’t fully control, while demanding total commitment to the values you do control such as your character, choices, and actions.
If Socratic philosophy is the greatest threat to state power, Stoicism is the framework for mass compliance. It's a psychological strategy for emotional management that replaces the traditional goals of inquiry. This system encourages individuals to obey authority and limit their emotional range to reach a state of internal comfort. This objective discourages the act of questioning. In this regard, it functions as an anti-philosophy.
The modern interest in Stoicism in my opinion is a move toward a secular version of the Christian experience. Modern Stoicism retains the Christian emphasis on submission and endurance while ignoring the superstitious elements inherent in Stoic physics, such as providential fatalism.
If your objective is to maintain a state of functioning passivity, Stoicism is the effective solution (but I wouldn't recommend it).
In some sense I agree, there is a level of defeatism in at least part of the wisdom of the stoics and very little questioning of authority. You do have the "If it's not right don't do it, if it's not true don't say it", and you are suppose to act on things if they are within your control. There's just no encouragement that you're more capable than you think or that you should do anything beyond "The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury." That doesn't really topple oppressive regimes.
It's a bit of a interesting take, you should act with virtue, but there is no encouragement to act against oppression and question authority. It seems very much like something to ignore and hope there's not a clash.
I don't think of stoicism as passive, though - it is just about responding rationally rather than irrationally, and one important aspect is focus on what can actually be modified, controlled or accomplished, not on fantasy. That idea seems crucial to modernity, where the main manner of control is to dangle outrage after outrage in front of everyone to keep them focused on spectacle and NOT focused on what they can actually, materially, physically do to change the world.