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.

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.

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.

I think of the "tough warrior philosopher" messaging as the installation medium for this hack. All hacks need an attractive bait/installer.

Once the hack sets in, you start reading more b/c you identify partially as "philosopher", and you start to see more of the genuine, peaceful, forgiving side, like in Meditations. The "we are all flawed men" kind of thing.

I'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.

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.

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?"

Very well put. I'd add the psychological concept of dissociation which seems to be central to the hackernews version of stoicism. Instead of connecting to your emotions it encourages pushing them down. That's just going to postpone the moment when you have to deal with them. Either because of psychosomatic illness, depression, burn out or mental breakdown. Attempting to influence, change, control feelings/emotions by rational concepts and thinking is doomed to fail. Emotions are on a lower level than verbal and logical mental processes.

What ? You don't want to read a book by a total rando about how stoicism will transform you into an alpha male in 30 days and with a gen ai cover of a Greek warrior from 300 ?

this thread seems to be filled with a lot of folks that have read and understood actual stoicism but are unaware of the fact that a "pop stoicism" exists out in the world.

this leads to a lot of people talking past each other.

As an actual prisoner in solitary confinement, the principles of stoic acceptance helped me a lot. Control is a powerful myth. It is stunning once it is taken away.

>Stoicism is, as much as anything, a philosophy of gratitude – and a gratitude, moreover, rugged enough to endure anything.

[flagged]