Actual stoicism is kind of darkly funny. Here's a word-for-word (translated, of course) excerpt from Epictetus:

"It's possible to understand what nature wants from situations where we're no different from other people. For example, when a slave breaks someone else's cup we're instantly ready to say 'These things happen.' So when it's a cup of yours that gets broken, appreciate that you have the same attitude as when it's someone else's cup. Transfer the principle to things of greater importance. Has someone else's child or wife died? There's no one who wouldn't say 'So it goes.' But when it's one's own child or wife who's died, the automatic response is 'Oh, no!' and 'Poor me!' It's essential to remember how we feel when we hear of this happening to others."

There are a few (darkly) funny claims in here:

- _ANYONE_ would be pretty indifferent to hear that someone's wife or child has died.

- You should feel the same about your wife or child as someone else's.

- Potentially, you should feel the same way about your wife as you do a cup.

I'm being cheeky with the last one, and I don't think there's _nothing_ to the quote above, however I cannot imagine most people being able to adopt this view, or seeing it as a view which _should_ be adopted.

I suppose some of it is also not dark at all, and is simply funny. Here's another excerpt:

"If you're informed that someone or other is speaking ill of you, don't defend yourself against the allegations, but respond by saying: "Well, he must be unaware of my other faults, otherwise these wouldn't have been the only ones he mentioned."

It's stated a bit differently, but this is effectively the exact tact taken by Eminem's competition-winning rap in 8 Mile. "These guys think I'm bad? They missed all this obvious stuff, let me lay out all my faults for you."

Here are some other translations of that passage (Enchiridion 26): https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...

- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.

- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”

- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.

The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.

[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]

I find stoicism to be Taoism's spiritual sibling in the West. From the Dao De Jing, passage 5, Red Pine's translation:

"Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs / heartless is the sage / treating people like straw dogs..."

and his translation of one commentary:

"Heaven and Earth aren't partial. They don't kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them. This is how the sage treats the people."

It reflects a detached, broad perspective on the world, which does not deny our very attached and narrow view, but rather augments it and provides a counterweight to our suffering.

I see it more as being about acceptance. If your wife dies, at some point, you will have to accept that your wife died and move on. This doesn't mean that you are cold or insensitive to it, it just means that you have accepted and processed this sorrow fully and are now ready to move on.

Stoicism for me is about practicing a sort of pre-acceptance of such things. To understand that everything bad that can happen eventually will happen (if you live long enough) and to accept it even before it has happened.

In more modern terms, I would call what Epictetus does here a reframing. It's used in therapy, marketing, PR and presumably other areas as well. Essentially it's saying "well, but if you look at it $this way$, it's not so bad, is it?" .

When strangers tell you that, it's very often with a malicious motivation, but it can be a helpful tool for coping with your own stuff.

This reminds me of this Buddhist story about the cup that is already broken. I think I like this a bit better, as it's not that the cup doesn't matter, but rather enjoying it for what it is while you have it.

A monk had a beautiful, delicate tea cup.

His student asked him about the cup. And much to the student's surprise he replied that the cup is already broken. “What do you mean?” – asked the student.

The monk said – “To me this cup is already broken.”

“I enjoy it. I drink from it. It holds my water admirably – sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put it on the shelf and the winds blows it over or I knock it off the table and it shatters on the ground then I say - of course.

When I understand the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

IMO, its not dark.

How I perceived it, Epictetus wants to say: things happen and you are on a spectrum of emotions based on the context (in case of death, how close you were to the person), try to minimize the length of the spectrum.

It is the teaching of acceptable of impermanence also found in Buddhism and other eastern lineages.

Maybe it was intentionally funny, maybe not.

But imagining oneself from a third perspective has a therapeutic effect that you can't really explain in words. You just do it and it's deeply soothing somehow.

As I get older, I read this entirely differently (as an appeal to empathy) than I did when I was younger (as an appeal to stolidity).

In other words, you should be pained for your neighbor when his slave breaks his cup. Maybe his grandmother left him that cup, and he's developed many fond memories around which he drank a soothing beverage in that heirloom. That empathy how we connect with people, build meaning, and make life richer.

He was a slave at some point, right? Maybe he was just trying to get people to chill out about their cups, to save some of his former peers an unpleasant time.

It's about accepting the bad things that will inevitably happen to us. "Loving your wife" and "grieving when she dies" are two separate things. We need mental framing that does not connect them, even though our default settings are to do so. Or at least that's how I'm reading it.

> You should feel the same about your wife or child as someone else's.

I don't see why it should be so.

It makes perfect sense to sympathize(?) and understand that somebody is grieving and is likely going through pain/emotions that I would have gone through if my wife/child has died. But that is not the same thing as me feeling those emotions.

Isn't this the distinction between empathy and sympathy?

those bullet points are an extremely literal and wrong interpretation of that quote. not a stoic btw so i have no dog in this fight. my only dog is literary interpretation.

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.

I think that’s the wrong takeaway - the point is that when it’s happening to someone else, it’s easier to see the ‘right’ attitude to take regarding misfortune.

Of course it’s awful to have your child die, but also it’s fairly commonly understood, that it can’t be the end of your life as well, you take the time you need to grieve, and then you go on living. “So it goes.”

The point with the cup is the same: it’s easier to council patience and forgiveness when your lap isn’t soaked with wine, when shards of your cup don’t litter the floor.

It’s demonstrating a route to removing yourself from the emotion of the present situation, to examine things rationally, dispassionately, like you would if they were happening to someone else, because it’s easier to see the right thing to do that way.

I wonder how evolutionary fit such indifference really is. It can, of course, be way too much as well as too little.

It simply doesn't work, even assuming you had no empathy as described in the quote.

I think if we did the opposite, where we imagine we are the same person as other people in various situations, I think we would be overcome with debilitating pain, unable to function and just curling up into a ball and crying all day.

Some people hold this view not by choice, but by biology. In clinical terms it’s associated with psychopathy, or antisocial personality disorder if you prefer more neutral language. These individuals can perform acts that would emotionally devastate most people while experiencing little to no internal response. Importantly, the vast majority of psychopaths are not violent criminals or serial killers.

This isn’t speculative philosophy. Psychopathy is a well-studied area of psychology and neuroscience, and we can identify brain patterns that allow clinicians to assess psychopathy with a high probability of being correct. This gives us something close to a real-world example of the “perfect stoic,” taken to an extreme beyond what any philosophy actually advocates. What’s striking is that psychopathy is strongly associated not with superior functioning, but with impulsivity, poor long-term planning, and difficulty integrating into society.

The takeaway is uncomfortable but important: emotions are not merely noise that interferes with rationality. They function as behavioral guardrails. Remove them entirely and pure logic alone is insufficient to regulate behavior in a social world. Without those constraints, people don’t become hyper-rational idealists. They become unstable, maladaptive, and conspicuously out of place.

I think the main reason is that social behavior is not rational as a first-order effect. It is irrational at the local level and only becomes rational indirectly, sometimes as a side effect of a side effect.

For example, if I see someone on the street who has just been stabbed, the strictly first-order rational response is to ignore it and keep walking. Helping costs time, energy, and introduces personal risk. From a narrow perspective, conserving resources dominates. Why spend calories calling an ambulance when ignoring it is cheaper?

The second- or third-order effects are where things change. Someone might see you help and treat you differently later, or the person you helped might repay you in some way. But in any single instance, those payoffs are unlikely. Most of the time you get nothing. Likewise, any stigma for not helping can evaporate quickly. People have short memories.

The real effect shows up in aggregate. If you consistently apply this kind of extreme local rationality minute to minute, people notice. Over time, patterns form. You are perceived as cold, unreliable, or unsafe to depend on, and you are gradually shunned. It’s not even the second-order effects that matter most, but the cumulative aggregation of them.

This is where evolution matters. Natural selection is the ultimate trial-based selector. It does not care about what is logically defensible in a single instance. It selects for strategies that survive repeated interaction with reality over long time horizons.

But selection does not operate only at the level of isolated individuals. Humans evolved in groups, and many traits exist specifically to regulate group dynamics. Emotions such as empathy, guilt, shame, and moral outrage function not just to guide personal behavior, but to coordinate groups and enforce norms. They create alignment without requiring explicit calculation.

Just as importantly, groups evolve mechanisms to identify and prune individuals who don’t internalize those constraints. Someone who consistently defects, exploits, or optimizes locally at the expense of others may do fine in isolated interactions, but over time they are marked, excluded, or expelled. This pruning is not moral. It is functional. Groups that fail to do it collapse under free-riding and mistrust.

Seen through this lens, emotions are not optional. They are load-bearing components of social systems. They bias individuals toward cooperation and simultaneously give groups tools to detect and remove those who can’t or won’t play by the same rules.

Natural selection already ran this experiment at scale. Psychopathy illustrates what happens when these mechanisms are weakened or absent. What remains is not a superior form of rationality, but a system that optimizes locally, destabilizes its environment, and ultimately selects itself out.

In that context, stoicism is best understood not as a prescription to remove emotion, but as an attempt to discipline it. Whether it succeeds depends on how narrowly or literally it is interpreted. Taken as emotional suppression or pure rational control, it collapses into the same failure modes already visible in the clinical and evolutionary evidence. Taken more loosely, it functions less as a truth about human behavior and more as a coping framework with limited scope.