Indifference is a power (2015)
aeon.co
aeon.co
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.
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.
The average young person who discovers stoicism via articles like this or via an influencer isn’t going to do a deep dive into classic literature as the next step.
They’re going to seek out more influencer slop that delivers more of what drew them to it: The prisoner/warrior bait about being so tough that you don’t care about anything.
Do we have data that estimates how often people regress to become emotionally stunted from any cause (Stoicism, other philosophical readings, alcohol/drug abuse, Alzehimer's/other neurodegenerative conditions)?
But it's not a choice between good or perfect. The internet style stoicism becomes a sort of learned helplessness for people who skim articles and think it means you should assume everything is out of your control and instead focus on ignoring your emotions.
I’m not disagreeing with this. I understand classic stoicism, but I’ve also seen the effects of modern pseudo-stoicism as pushed by influencers and social media.
Focusing on stoicism and trying to dodge the effects of your emotions is a reasonable strategy for someone who is truly stuck in a situation, like the prisoners or warriors cited in the article.
But it becomes a self-defeating action when the situation you’re dealing with is something that should be addressed or changed rather than dealing with it like you’re a prisoner and helpless victim. The common example is someone in a toxic job who is furiously consuming stoicism social media and trying to act stoic in the face of a job they hate instead of using that energy to apply for another job.
It certainly isn’t an indictment against Stoicism.
As I said, I’m talking about the article and the pseudo-stoicism pushed on social media
My issue with modern internet style pseudo-stoicism is that it's fixated on becoming indifferent (the title of this article, even) and breeds a sort of learned helplessness. The article's sub-heading is about prisoners and warriors, but using techniques optimized for being a prisoner or stuck in a war isn't quite right for someone navigating a toxic relationship or toxic job where you're not actually entirely helpless.
Indifference is the best emotion to stay in a situation.
We're still human, and the collaborative problem solving the ancients did still applies today. That much of the concepts survived and maintained relevance from ancient Greece, to Rome, to now lends them a certain 'time tested' quality.
That's the problem.
This brand of stoicism you refer to is high order “cope” with your emotional self telling you it is wrong.
"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?"
With that said, my words aren't an endorsement of Stoicism, nor am I against it - I know little about it because I don't think it addresses my specific needs.
Well now that I've read that part of the article, I can say that it's a pretty lame retort.
>Stoicism is, as much as anything, a philosophy of gratitude – and a gratitude, moreover, rugged enough to endure anything.
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.
Stoic sources actually state explicitly that Stoic ethics is all about preventing "self-harming behavior" arising from our emotions. They just have a much more expansive definition of what's "self-harming" than modern society does! Raw emotional responses are seen as mere facts of nature that cannot be meaningfully avoided and repressed, but they can still be subjected to reasonable judgment, and then accepted or critiqued. The common modern idea that Stoicism is merely about emotional repression and a totally "unemotional" stance is quite a misconception.
Honestly, I blame Mr. Spock. Another thought I've been chewing on is emotional repression from a certain crowd of people who grew up as socially isolated nerds and / or autists that identified strongly with what they perceived as hyper rational characters like Spock. Sprinkle in high technology and the fact that these characters succeed at things nerds love and you get hero worship and emulation. Then add in all the masculine marketing we get from "stoic" characters like the dude from Drive to get another layer to the equation.
this leads to a lot of people talking past each other.
Yes, the pop philosophy folks tend to confuse Stoicism with Spartanism, just like they confuse Epicureanism with Hedonism. It also helps to have a basic understanding of ancient Aretaic (Virtue) Ethics and the context in which some of these works were written (e.g., was one work or school of thought developed in response to some other one that preceded it).
As always, it's best to read the original works, and in the case of the Stoics (Epictetus, Aurelius, Seneca) they're really not difficult reads assuming a decent modern translation.
Also stay away from the manosphere influencers who peddle the weird self help stuff you allude to, whether under the guise of Stoicism or anything else.
What 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.
"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.
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.
However, the line about other's indifference I think can only be read as dark funny to a modern reader:
> has someone else's child or wife died? There's no one who wouldn't say 'So it goes.'
Either everyone you know dies 1 by 1, or you do.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Self deprecation can indeed be disarming. But it must never cross the point of eliminating self respect. That's when you go from easy going to pure loser.
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.
• Classical stoicism was an anesthetic for the powerful.
• Both suppress the self in service of an external system.
• Neither are about empathy.
[1] You absolutely don't want to be a single woman in 1st century AD.
[2] acceptance vs altruism
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?
"Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs / heartless is the sage / treating people like straw dogs..."
and his translation of one commentary:
"Heaven and Earth aren't partial. They don't kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them. This is how the sage treats the people."
It reflects a detached, broad perspective on the world, which does not deny our very attached and narrow view, but rather augments it and provides a counterweight to our suffering.
There's a part where it talks any how, if you're sailing on a river and an unoccupied boat comes down the river towards you, you simply avoid it. But if that boat were occupied, you might holler at the person to get out of your way, and it might be upsetting.
There's also a passage where Zhuangzi's wife has died, and his friend find him merrily beating a drum. He asks if this is the proper way to mourn his wife. Zhuangzi replies that he had initially cried and lamented when his wife passed, until he realized that she had become what she was before she had lived, and that to everything there was a season. (There's definitely more here than I remember off the top of my head.)
Tangentially, if one has only read the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi and Liehzi are also great and worth reading. The Liehzi is very short, and the Zhuangzi can be abridged to the first 7 chapters if desired. (Chapter 17 slaps but is mostly a reiteration of chapter 1.) You could read all 3 in a weekend (if you abridge Zhuangzi).
Some free audiobooks:
Tao Te Ching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCLpgXmK3cg [1hr]
Liehzi: https://librivox.org/the-book-of-lieh-tzu-by-lieh-tzu-transl... [3hr]
Zhuangzi abridged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCQYEeHlXOY [2hr]
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.
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.
- 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 see you included all the translations except Stephen Walton's. Yes he took some liberties, but I like it anyway :)
Thanks also for making it open-source. I used it for a blog post about a story I remembered from my school textbook :) https://shreevatsa.net/post/bazin-letter-box/ -> https://shreevatsa.net/bazin-letter-box/
Stephen Walton's translation is actually my favourite! I omitted it here because this is HN and likely someone would complain the translation is clearly incorrect because it talks about “Your neighbor’s car gets hit in a parking lot”. But to include it too just for completeness :) https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...
> The software too pleasantly just worked, with no setup or install required: just clone the sample app, change the filenames and <base href="..."> in index.html as it mentions. It’s a joy when that happens.
Suffice to say, many people haven't had as much success as you: they fumbled around for 10-20 commits and ended up with something broken. I think requiring people to edit json is just too much :)
In a different frame, most of our negative emotions are there to help us - by signifying that something is wrong. You could be thankful for having them so that you are prompted to investigate what's wrong. It's only when we forget that feelings are only a part of our experience and start to identify with feelings (positive and negative) that trouble arises.
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.”
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.
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.
Whether those traits a “real stoicism” or not doesn’t matter, because that’s the way it gets spread through TikTok length discourse
People aren’t really engaging with their philosophy (“love of wisdom”) but pick and choose so it reinforces what they already believe. They don’t exactly think about it they stay mildly glossing some concepts in the popular amateur/ social media sphere.
I'm not advocating for religious institutions or theocracy, mind you, I'm trying to formulate an argument how someone talking about how living life in accordance to Stoics on YouTube or Christ in a church is more of an aesthetics issue than a virtue one.
Though I feel by the time I successfully formulate that argument I'll have multiple groups clamoring for my head.
I'm aware that society had these same sorts of issues prior to social media but it's still depressing watching it play out.
I don't feel that is a "undesirable masculine trait", I live by that and still "feel things" and have emotions.
ie, he saw the world as full of misery and difficulty, and saw modifying your internal experience as the only possible path forward.
Why do your opinions not matter?
As I get older and as my parents get older I take comfort from that.
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.
Thats different from actually being choked and tapping to end the fight.
Also, BJJ has been one of the biggest unlocks in my personal growth and stoicism journey. Things that used to make me uncomfortable or annoy me in daily simply don’t. I’m not externalizing my negative emotions, I’ve just become better at dealing with them through repeated challenges. Early on my teacher told me that everyone loses, but the difference between white and black belts is the black will be calm thinking how to escape until the very end. Contrast the white belt who loses control and flails around accomplishing nothing.
For example, anxiety exists and sometimes occurs, and it means parts of me are trying to be very careful and precise about something. This can be a problem at times if it overcomes you, but it can also be leveraged into a strength once you figure why it's flaring up at the moment.
Another example, travel used to be a nuisance, but now I've setup and continue refining some packing and preparation checklists for trips of varying length. Now it's a big no-brainer to be well-prepared for a short work-trip and I'm usually very calm about it.
It’s being driven by people that are making tiktoks after they learned about it by watching a five minute YouTube video. It’s a very lossy game of telephone.
I would love to sit back with some quotation from Marcus Aurelius about how it's not anything I have to worry about, but that's the part I never quite bought into with Stoicism I suppose. So ignore all of the above.
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.
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.
If you aren't someone who displays that specific bundle of traits/behaviors, I would suggest being stoic about it and not taking the term personally.
It's strange. Clearly at some point society at large came to believe that the current crop of terms at the time was undesirable. Yet various modern analogues are treated differently.
Of course it's also possible that I live in a slightly different bubble than you do.
Regardless of how the statistics for that specific set of behaviors break down my personal experience is that both the application and acceptance of such terminology (ie referring to various sets of behaviors which it might make sense to group together based on whatever metric) is highly selective in a manner that's convenient for the party expressing it. The statement is often true but the grouping superfluous, included only (seemingly) to push an agenda.
It's a term used to apply guilt across all males to subvert any actual debate.
I think it’s important to follow etiquette in common language rather then label entire minorities or groups based off of statistics.
Race or poverty?
> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
The person who most embodies these traits for me, in my life, is...my mum. I don't view them as exclusively toxic any more than I view them as exclusively masculine, either. Sometimes you really do just choose to hug your kids even when they were aggravating little twits five minutes ago and you're still mad at them, and that's a good thing.
Even supposing that were true, why does it make sense to invent and use a discriminatory label for a whole group? You just assert that without justification. Is that acceptable in any other context or for any other group? Do we speak of toxic blackness, or toxic femininity, or toxic Islam?
It means men are being poisoned.
This would read like satire in most places besides HN
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.
The whole point is that men communicating about their inner emotions and feelings have to learn to be extremely diplomatic about it, lest their communication be misinterpreted by others (intentionally or not!) as them just freaking out and throwing an angry temper tantrum. Men have responsibilities to those around them that ultimately require developing strong discipline and keeping their emotions under check, at least to a very significant extent. This is what the whole notion of "toxic masculinity/femininity/whatever" is getting at; ultimately, uncontrolled anger and other negative emotions can be a whole lot more toxic than simple emotional restraint.
Is it actually though?
Who un-desires them? You?
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.
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.
https://feelinggood.com/2020/10/26/213-from-feeling-good-to-...
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.
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."
Maybe that is good, now that I write it out. I think "understanding" is actually a pretty dumb mental state to invest a lot in.
It also isn't really available in a crisis, in the moment. All our long term work is really to train the anxious idiot part of ourselves who runs the show most of the time how to cope with what the world and body are doing right now. That person is very much connected to their emotions, no matter what story we make up about it. You need practice being that person feeling those emotions as well as practice analyzing them.
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.
Almost literally that. Revisit the moments that made you "suppress" things. Think of it as a post-mortem. It won't be the same, an echo distorted by time and distance, But pay attention to what you set aside. Suppressing emotions is the short term hack. The ideal is to be able to have them and still be centered. Only way to get better at that is practice.
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.
It's not a good "habit" to disregard negative emotions without also examining them.
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?
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.
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...
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.
This is an interesting perspective that I've practiced but haven't explicitly considered before.
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”.
Stoicism has its definite positives, but balancing the privileged emperor is always worth being mindful and expressive of.
This years theme was on well-being, I found it useful.
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.
https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powe...
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...
Should I understand that to be a critique?
- I think each generation can have a different reason for adopting any philosophy it’s about whether it serves you or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're actually interested in stoicism I highly encourage picking up books by some actual scholars.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
Do you know any history of his rule? He was the bloodiest most expansionist and slave oriented emperor of otherwise the most oppressive empires in all of history.
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).
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.