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.

"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.

Whether those traits a “real stoicism” or not doesn’t matter, because that’s the way it gets spread through TikTok length discourse

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.

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.

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.

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...

https://www.melrobbins.com/book/the-let-them-theory/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994262

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.

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.

- 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”.]

"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."

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I don't feel that is a "undesirable masculine trait", I live by that and still "feel things" and have emotions.

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.

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.

Who un-desires them? You?

Is it actually though?

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."

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.

It's not a good "habit" to disregard negative emotions without also examining them.

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.

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?