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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

In practice, the term is never used this way. It's used as a cudgel.

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.

Toxic masculinity doesn’t mean men are poisonous.

It means men are being poisoned.

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.

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.

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.

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.