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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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 ?
Right, they're barely related ideologies. If someone took up "Christianity" based on popular Reddit conception of what it is, getting their information via YouTube or whatever, it's going to be something very distant from Christianity. It's unfortunate they have seized the public understanding of the term.
While I agree with your whole take, there is one point that triggered me.
What most¹ people don't get when they say "just learn to deal with your emotions" is that some of us "feel" emotions way more strongly than others. For me personally emotions are pain, far more stronger than actual physical pain is. Both unpleasant ones and pleasant ones. While I've learned to "deal" with it as I grew older, it's not a walk in a park, cost me solid chunk of my mental energy and that's what I need to do every fucking day.
Most people would say "but hey, that's what makes life worth living!". Not for me, I would rather prefer not to feel anything at all than to be subjected to a constant never-ending roller-coaster I can't get off² from. If walking past sick stray animal would maybe cause you³ a slight discomfort, for me would be excruciating feeling in my chest which I can either suppress (and live with the choice for the rest of my life) or drop whatever I was doing to try to help (and to subject myself to more pain in the process). There is no win for me here.
And yes, I've tried many-many things under the Sun, the truth is that I was just born this way. And I'm not alone like that. So telling to "just deal" with emotions is not helpful.
___
¹⁾ I'm not saying you don't, just bear with me for a moment.
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.
- 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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
I thought the darkest thing you were going to point to was the matter of fact reference to the role of the slave as the inadvertent cup breaker! Some wonderfully insightful thoughts on how to manage one's emotions when confronted by life's challenges, of which I think are worth reading, but taking for granted the other human whose life is not their own and who is treated as (valuable) property by the philosopher is pretty dark to me.
I'm guessing that the institution of slavery was part of the entire imperial project of conquest so even if their conscience was briefly troubled it would've fallen into the 'so it goes' basket. But it does seem strange to the modern reader.
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.
> 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'll take this further and I'm not sure if I've seen it anywhere, but I feel like humor is an absolutely necessary component to any philosophy or life practice in this direction.
In a way, this is an idea that to me, rises above perhaps the specifics of all of these isms. People from Dave Chappelle to Kurt Vonnegut really get this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
Yeah, none of that is "real stoicism", but just the hydroponic TikTok version of it, as you say.
This can happen to anything if TikTok is your main source of information; everything becomes life hacks, "tricks", and "did you know that <insert biased misinterpretation of well known thing>" types of knowledge bites. Philosophy is unfortunately not the only victim of short-length "edutainment".
I think that Stoicism might be particularly vulnerable to this because of its built in flexibility, which makes it easy for people to divulge their interpretations of it with little pushback. If you haven't read much of it, and without a clear rirgid "rule set" for what Stoicism is (other than its tenets in the cardinal virtues and dichotomy of control), you might believe me if I tell you that it is a Philosophy that encourages suicide and tells you that being sad because a family member passed is stupid.
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:
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."
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.
“Ignoring” is not the same as “noticing”; the difference is right there in the words!
You are right that it is undesirable to be a slave to one's emotions, to keep having emotional outbursts or “expressing” all emotions impulsively. But at the other extreme if you try to address this by building a habit of dissociation and “ignoring” your feelings (as you propose), that is also not good, and not how Stoicism or meditation address it. (To use an analogy: it would be bad for a parent to be a slave to their children, or for a charioteer to be led by their horses instead of controlling them. But ignoring them isn't great either!)
Stoicism addresses this preemptively, building a practice of having a proportionate response to things outside our control. Meditation also addresses this by, as you said, noticing emotions when they arise, recognizing them for what they are (creating some distance), and letting them pass instead of indulging them. Ignoring your emotions or letting them burst out are both different from letting them pass/seeing them through.
>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.
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.
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.
“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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Right, Marcus Aurelius an Emperor of Rome, successful reformer of it's society, public works, and education, successful leader of it's military, and generally considered one of the leaders of Rome's Golden age, was merely an unsuccessful loser trying to cope.
The only one coping here is the author of the comment, who has evidently entirely mis-understood anything about Stoicism and needs to read more.
Take a look into the illustration about Seneca on wasting your time, e.g. - from what Ive observed: Successful people know exactly when their time gets wasted and what could be done instead and not to waste time on irrelevant things.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
Aurornis|1 month ago
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.
zozbot234|1 month ago
DebtDeflation|1 month ago
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.
oooyay|1 month ago
jvanderbot|1 month ago
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.
raffael_de|1 month ago
b00ty4breakfast|1 month ago
komali2|1 month ago
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.
6stringmerc|1 month ago
>Stoicism is, as much as anything, a philosophy of gratitude – and a gratitude, moreover, rugged enough to endure anything.
parpfish|1 month ago
this leads to a lot of people talking past each other.
Isamu|1 month ago
throw4847285|1 month ago
"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?"
poulpy123|1 month ago
eudamoniac|1 month ago
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timeattack|1 month ago
What most¹ people don't get when they say "just learn to deal with your emotions" is that some of us "feel" emotions way more strongly than others. For me personally emotions are pain, far more stronger than actual physical pain is. Both unpleasant ones and pleasant ones. While I've learned to "deal" with it as I grew older, it's not a walk in a park, cost me solid chunk of my mental energy and that's what I need to do every fucking day.
Most people would say "but hey, that's what makes life worth living!". Not for me, I would rather prefer not to feel anything at all than to be subjected to a constant never-ending roller-coaster I can't get off² from. If walking past sick stray animal would maybe cause you³ a slight discomfort, for me would be excruciating feeling in my chest which I can either suppress (and live with the choice for the rest of my life) or drop whatever I was doing to try to help (and to subject myself to more pain in the process). There is no win for me here.
And yes, I've tried many-many things under the Sun, the truth is that I was just born this way. And I'm not alone like that. So telling to "just deal" with emotions is not helpful.
___
¹⁾ I'm not saying you don't, just bear with me for a moment.
²⁾ In both senses.
³⁾ Not you specifically.
tsunamifury|1 month ago
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everdrive|1 month ago
"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.
svat|1 month ago
- 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”.]
everdrive|1 month ago
"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."
flatline|1 month ago
"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.
sharkbird2|1 month ago
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.
s1mplicissimus|1 month ago
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.
throwaw12|1 month ago
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.
al_borland|1 month ago
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.”
mock-possum|1 month ago
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.
krzat|1 month ago
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.
lifis|1 month ago
lr4444lr|1 month ago
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.
herdymerzbow|1 month ago
I'm guessing that the institution of slavery was part of the entire imperial project of conquest so even if their conscience was briefly troubled it would've fallen into the 'so it goes' basket. But it does seem strange to the modern reader.
bee_rider|1 month ago
bsoles|1 month ago
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?
jrm4|1 month ago
In a way, this is an idea that to me, rises above perhaps the specifics of all of these isms. People from Dave Chappelle to Kurt Vonnegut really get this.
stodor89|1 month ago
deadbabe|1 month ago
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ndr|1 month ago
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unknown|1 month ago
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threethirtytwo|1 month ago
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.
parpfish|1 month ago
Whether those traits a “real stoicism” or not doesn’t matter, because that’s the way it gets spread through TikTok length discourse
drakenot|1 month ago
SirFatty|1 month ago
I don't feel that is a "undesirable masculine trait", I live by that and still "feel things" and have emotions.
vannucci|1 month ago
threethirtytwo|1 month ago
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.
vcanales|1 month ago
Yeah, none of that is "real stoicism", but just the hydroponic TikTok version of it, as you say.
This can happen to anything if TikTok is your main source of information; everything becomes life hacks, "tricks", and "did you know that <insert biased misinterpretation of well known thing>" types of knowledge bites. Philosophy is unfortunately not the only victim of short-length "edutainment".
I think that Stoicism might be particularly vulnerable to this because of its built in flexibility, which makes it easy for people to divulge their interpretations of it with little pushback. If you haven't read much of it, and without a clear rirgid "rule set" for what Stoicism is (other than its tenets in the cardinal virtues and dichotomy of control), you might believe me if I tell you that it is a Philosophy that encourages suicide and tells you that being sad because a family member passed is stupid.
lern_too_spel|1 month ago
drcongo|1 month ago
stackedinserter|1 month ago
Who un-desires them? You?
naasking|1 month ago
Is it actually though?
dot_treo|1 month ago
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.
maxverse|1 month ago
https://feelinggood.com/2020/10/26/213-from-feeling-good-to-...
zeroonetwothree|1 month ago
blamestross|1 month ago
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.
randomtoast|1 month ago
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."
Y_Y|1 month ago
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.
alphazard|1 month ago
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.
zozbot234|1 month ago
It's not a good "habit" to disregard negative emotions without also examining them.
svat|1 month ago
You are right that it is undesirable to be a slave to one's emotions, to keep having emotional outbursts or “expressing” all emotions impulsively. But at the other extreme if you try to address this by building a habit of dissociation and “ignoring” your feelings (as you propose), that is also not good, and not how Stoicism or meditation address it. (To use an analogy: it would be bad for a parent to be a slave to their children, or for a charioteer to be led by their horses instead of controlling them. But ignoring them isn't great either!)
Stoicism addresses this preemptively, building a practice of having a proportionate response to things outside our control. Meditation also addresses this by, as you said, noticing emotions when they arise, recognizing them for what they are (creating some distance), and letting them pass instead of indulging them. Ignoring your emotions or letting them burst out are both different from letting them pass/seeing them through.
Jblx2|1 month ago
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?
havblue|1 month ago
rramadass|1 month ago
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...
vicek22|1 month ago
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.
fs_software|1 month ago
This is an interesting perspective that I've practiced but haven't explicitly considered before.
renewiltord|1 month ago
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”.
j45|1 month ago
Stoicism has its definite positives, but balancing the privileged emperor is always worth being mindful and expressive of.
electrosphere|1 month ago
This years theme was on well-being, I found it useful.
game_the0ry|1 month ago
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.
SteveJS|1 month ago
https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powe...
andsoitis|1 month ago
https://www.melrobbins.com/book/the-let-them-theory/
drjasonharrison|1 month ago
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...
unknown|1 month ago
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unknown|1 month ago
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joduplessis|1 month ago
bethekidyouwant|1 month ago
- I think each generation can have a different reason for adopting any philosophy it’s about whether it serves you or not.
Jblx2|1 month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994262
begueradj|1 month ago
MonkeyClub|1 month ago
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.
nathan_compton|1 month ago
wagwang|1 month ago
tracerbulletx|1 month ago
belinder|1 month ago
c22|1 month ago
anondual|1 month ago
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.
zozbot234|1 month ago
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.
PedroBatista|1 month ago
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.
N_Lens|1 month ago
Isamu|1 month ago
thejackgoode|1 month ago
voidhorse|1 month ago
If you're actually interested in stoicism I highly encourage picking up books by some actual scholars.
BugsJustFindMe|1 month ago
joshuakoehler|1 month ago
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.
black_13|1 month ago
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behole|1 month ago
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per1|1 month ago
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webdevver|1 month ago
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toss1|1 month ago
The only one coping here is the author of the comment, who has evidently entirely mis-understood anything about Stoicism and needs to read more.
Yikes
jebarker|1 month ago
KellyCriterion|1 month ago
Take a look into the illustration about Seneca on wasting your time, e.g. - from what Ive observed: Successful people know exactly when their time gets wasted and what could be done instead and not to waste time on irrelevant things.
There are lot of inspiring mind sets in there.
Jgoauh|1 month ago
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BJones12|1 month ago
xzjis|1 month ago
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.
ertgbnm|1 month ago
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?
richardanaya|1 month ago
andsoitis|1 month ago
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.
tsunamifury|1 month ago
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.”
iammjm|1 month ago
speak_plainly|1 month ago
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).
mrweasel|1 month ago
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.
nathan_compton|1 month ago