Is it time for Post-Stoicism?

Stoicism has never been more popular. Is it time for a reaction?

Stoicism has arguably never been more popular in its 2,500-year history. You’ve probably gone on a date with a guy, or maybe you are that guy, who says his favorite book is Meditations. The Daily Stoic has millions of followers across social media platforms and has sold somewhere around a million copies. Michael’s own boss put “the obstacle is the way” in the company’s list of core values, drawing on a rough quote from Marcus Aurelius that is also the title of a business book by Ryan Holiday. Hundreds (thousands? Tens of thousands?) of anonymous Twitter accounts with Greek statue profile pictures spout “stoic wisdom” ad nauseum, if we may use the Latin.

Yet, any halfway-decent movement will reach a point where it feels played out. The high modernist ideals of the 20th century failed to deliver fully on the promise of a legible, scientific world. The disused concrete monoliths of modernism paved the way for a postmodernist reaction that rejected grand narratives of truth and progress in favor of pluralism and relativism. Musical examples of these reactions abound: a new generation of musicians in the late 70s, feeling that once-cool punk rock had become formulaic and overcommercialized, forged their own post-punk movement led by groups like Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Joy Division. Post-rationalists (postrats) are not “just rats who post” but rather adherents who reject rationalism’s historical neglect of intuition, social and emotional vibes, and praxis. Post-impressionism, post-hardcore, postcolonialism: these movements all answer the shortcomings of the movements from which they spawned.

Stoicism’s resurgence in self-help and pop-psychology content brings along old shortcomings. So, after a few thousand years, is it time for a reaction? Is it time for post-Stoicism?

Why Meditations is your Hinge date’s favorite book

Stoicism has lasted this long for a reason. Popular pieces of Stoic writing, like Meditations, are chock-full of action-oriented, accessible philosophy. In the case of Marcus Aurelius, the context of his life makes the advice that much more compelling: private thoughts from an all-powerful emperor of Rome, deified immediately upon his death, who managed to avoid corruption by his office:

Claim your title to these epithets—good, decent, truthful, in mind clear, cooperative, and independent—and take care then not to swap them for other names: and if you do forfeit these titles, return to them quickly.

He promotes a spirit of both altruism and dedication to one’s craft:

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for the money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

Beyond the self-sacrificial, Marcus Aurelius preaches a long list of virtues. He suggests being true and honest to yourself even in the most public settings:

When you speak in the senate or to any individual, be straightforward and not pedantic. Use language which rings true.

He advocates mental fortitude and acceptance of fate in the spirit of the Serenity Prayer (although he doesn’t necessarily suggest how to achieve it):

The first step: don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you’ll be no one, nowhere – like Hadrian, like Augustus.

And he throws in a bit of good, old-fashioned grindset. He knew how to Lock In:

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time – even when hard at work.

Writing like this is legitimately helpful 2,000 years later. Marcus Aurelius shows deep concern with cultivating virtue, seeking truth, and, most critically, acting on these thoughts rather than simply philosophizing. This book is actually a personal journal, published posthumously, not a work of philosophy. Aurelius makes it clear that endless reflection will get you nowhere–virtually every moral claim is a call to action. (This guy knew his praxis.)

Where Stoicism falls flat, Or, why that Hinge date sucked

Why do we roll our eyes so hard at those anon Twitter accounts? And why is it that the worst grindset startup influencer you know has a tattoo referencing Meditations?¹

Firstly, you can’t just not be anxious. It doesn’t work like that. Søren Kierkegaard wrote:

Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way, has learned the ultimate.

Emotions are useful. Of course, in the American masculine tradition, it’s admirable to steel yourself against your fate. But this ignores the real, pragmatic value of emotions. Plausibly, the evolutionary purpose of emotions is to help us survive, and emotions do so when we feel them proportionately to the environmental factors that trigger them. What gets people in trouble is too much or too little of an emotion, in the wrong scenario–not feeling them in the first place.

Resilience against hardship is good, but life is not all a matter of choosing one’s mental state. Real, physical events cause emotions. Sometimes these causes are systemic in nature, and an undue focus on action to solve one’s problems may obscure when an individual is caught in the gears of history. Other times, a stoic’s blind emotional endurance could lead them to neglect tractable solutions to personal problems that they do have the power to change. This point is obvious to mentally healthy leftists, but is lost on many of pop-Stoicism’s consumers.

And yet, Meditations is all about action until it comes to accepting Fate. In Greco-Roman culture, people could not change their pre-determined fate. Instead, their task was to meet their destiny with dignity, thereby confirming the quality of their character. People had pre-determined degrees of character, with mythological heroes (and the ruling class) possessing the greatest virtue, of course. The whole system is rather rigid, and it neglects a key aspect of the Serenity Prayer: having the wisdom to know what is within your ability to change. While Meditations lauds accepting one’s fate, avoiding excessive fatalism seems to be a better path to actual virtue. The Stoic recommendation can easily slip from purposive action to helpless acceptance of one’s circumstances (or faults).

Lastly, this mindset is fundamentally conservative. A blindness to root causes neglects systemic causes of suffering in society. A bias toward accepting fate is necessarily a bias to accepting the status quo. This is probably why the anon Twitter accounts tend to be political conservatives, interspersing quotes from Epictetus with pictures of milkmaids and yearnings for homesteads.

Rescuing the good parts of Stoicism

If “post-” movements are reactions, what would make a good post-Stoicism?

We want to rescue the good parts. Being a good person is about action, not just philosophy. Promote the virtues of honesty, truth-seeking, and frankness in both actions and words. “If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it.” You should cultivate mental fortitude, but you should be sure to exercise it in its proper context. We should aspire to be the best versions of ourselves we can be.

But we need to add in a healthy dose of emotional maturity. Do not blindly suppress anxiety and emotions: acknowledge the value and role of feelings. Don’t be overly fatalistic. Don’t blame everything an individual does on character or destiny, but instead leave room for the influences their environment has on them.

And most importantly, please do not pretend that recapturing a virtuous life means consuming the right “Stoic” grifter content, lest you end up falling down the trad-adjacent rabbit hole that seems to have consumed so many hobbyist philosophers today.

I will not buy the beef collagen supplements. I will not buy the beef collagen supplements. I will not buy the beef collagen supplements.

In short, be a Stoic, but maybe consider going to therapy, and try acknowledging structural causes of problems even as you bias yourself toward action (your date might benefit from this part). More concisely, as Marcus Aurelius wrote in his timeless style:

Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be. Be one.

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I had a great time writing this post with one of my best friends from high school, Peter. Peter is in my weekly article club, is better than me at throwing a frisbee (but worse at skiing), and is a researcher doing work in AI safety and interpretability living in New York.

1. It’s me, Michael. I have a small tattoo on my left bicep referencing a section of Book 3 of Meditations. Oops.