This Drove Me Away from Stoicism

• A systematic critique of Stoicism — both popular and classical — arguing that its core doctrines are self-defeating, unlivable, and ultimately grounded in an extravagant religious cosmology, even though the intuitions behind them are genuinely valuable and best absorbed through Aristotle.
  • The speaker spent a year deeply studying Stoic texts and interviewing leading scholars, and came to find the philosophy comically wrong — yet still worth reading because its extremism clarifies truths that more moderate philosophies can make too easy to ignore.
  • The lecture proceeds in four stages: a critique of pop Stoicism (via Nietzsche), a critique of “real” Stoic ethics (via Cicero), an analysis of Stoic views on human nature, and finally an examination of Stoic cosmic nature (religion), showing how each layer depends on increasingly radical claims until it requires belief in Zeus.

Pop Stoicism Is a Coping Mechanism, Not a Philosophy

• Nietzsche’s diagnosis: Stoicism appeals to people who have been crushed by fate, not because its doctrines are true, but because they are psychologically comforting.

  • The core Stoic claim — that external goods like health, wealth, honor, and even the lives of loved ones are “indifferents” — is highly unintuitive. People adopt it not through reasoning but because it numbs the pain of losing control over the external world.
  • This explains the personal histories of the great Stoics themselves: Zeno was shipwrecked and lost everything; Epictetus was born a slave; Seneca was held captive by Nero, who murdered his own family and political rivals; Marcus Aurelius, though emperor, was thrust into power against his will, endured plague, invasion, rebellion, the deaths of most of his children, and likely his wife’s infidelity.
  • The historical pattern confirms the diagnosis: Stoicism surged during the Roman Empire precisely when people lost their political freedoms en masse, functioning as a collective coping mechanism. Its modern resurgence should be read as a symptom that something has gone wrong in contemporary life.

• Stoicism is the most ingenious coping mechanism ever devised because it lets you pursue external goods while claiming they don’t matter.

  • After declaring externals “indifferent,” the Stoics reintroduce them as “preferred indifferents” — wealth, health, noble birth, good looks — which the Stoic is fully licensed to pursue.
  • This means a Stoic can live essentially the same life as any ambitious person, targeting the same worldly goods, while maintaining a self-serving narrative that they are above it all. Compare this to Christianity or Buddhism, where genuine belief demands radical reorientation of one’s goals toward another world.
  • The result is the most outrageous manifestations of modern pop Stoicism: Stoic techniques for getting rich, getting laid, prosperity gospel Stoicism — the Instagram bro posting his Lambo with a Marcus Aurelius quote.

• This is not a modern perversion. The great Stoics themselves were accused of the same hypocrisy.

  • Seneca, while in exile and having lost much of his estate, wrote eloquently that “the spirit makes men rich” and that money matters no more than earthly weight. Upon returning from exile and becoming one of the most powerful men in Nero’s court, he proceeded to amass 300 million sesterces — 300 times the senatorial wealth threshold — through gifts from Nero, confiscated properties from political purges, and high-interest loans.
  • His contemporaries savaged him for it: “By what kind of wisdom has Seneca heaped up 300 million sesterces in four years as a palace insider?"

"Focus on What Is Up to You” Sounds Reasonable but Collapses Under Scrutiny

• The Stoic injunction to focus on what is “up to you” seems like common sense, but the Stoic definition of “up to you” is so narrow it becomes meaningless — and ultimately requires belief in a deterministic universe governed by Zeus.
  • The Stoics say only your “assents” — your internal judgments and propositions — are up to you. Everything else — the economy, the weather, your body, even whether you can close a door (what if you slip? what if an earthquake hits?) — is not up to you.
  • The clarifying question: if closing a door is not up to you because of all the ways it could go wrong, in what sense are your assents up to you? Your beliefs about money, pain, sex, prestige, and death are shaped by upbringing, culture, biology, and environment — all things outside your control. People go to therapy and journal and still cannot stop assenting to “money is a good.”
  • The Stoic answer is that “up to you” does not mean free will. The Stoics are strict determinists. “Happiness is up to you” only means your character is the primary cause of your happiness — but your character itself is determined by prior causes stretching back to childhood, over which you had no control. The definition is not just misleading; it is self-defeating.

Stoic Virtue Ethics Radicalizes a Good Intuition into Absurdity

• The Stoics start from a sound intuition — that responding well to circumstances matters — but radicalize it in four directions that make the doctrine unlivable.

  • The outcome of your actions does not matter. Quintus Metellus won his wars, returned in triumph, watched his sons become consuls, and died happily. Marcus Regulus lost, was captured, sent back to Rome to negotiate, argued against the peace, honorably returned to the barbarians knowing he would be tortured and killed — and was. The Stoics say both lived equally happy lives because both were fully virtuous.

  • The type of virtuous activity does not matter. If a sage’s only domain of agency is how he wipes his ass — not too soft, not too hard — the Stoics say he is as virtuous and happy as Quintus Metellus. Meaning, variety, richness, impact, and legacy do not factor into the good life at all. The Stoic view of happiness retreats entirely to the singularity of reason: are you making the right assents?

  • The type of vice does not matter. All wrongdoing is equal. Plato, who was not a sage, is as miserable as Hitler. Both failed equally at living the good life. The Stoics are explicit: every person who has ever lived, including Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, has failed equally at happiness.

  • The length of a virtuous life does not matter. If you become a sage at 27 and are immediately killed by an asteroid, your life is as happy and well-lived as if you had lived to 100 and taught others to be sages. This is the only way their philosophy of suicide works — and it requires this extreme premise.

• Happiness is a strict binary for the Stoics: you are either a sage or you are miserable, with no middle ground.

  • The metaphor: a person drowning a millimeter below the surface can no more breathe than one in the depths of the ocean. Progress toward virtue, no matter how great, does not matter until you break the surface. There have been zero sages in all of human history.
  • The Stoics do recognize progress — contentment, joy, and affirmation come in degrees — but they refuse to call anyone happy who is not a full sage. This makes their ethical system practically useless as a guide to living.

• Aristotle captures the same intuitions without any of these radicalizations.

  • Aristotle says virtue is the dominant component of happiness (roughly 95%) but externals matter somewhat (roughly 5%). He recognizes a hierarchy of virtues, differences between vices, and that the outcomes and contexts of action matter. If you find Stoic intuitions appealing, Aristotle gives you the focus on virtue and resilience without the absurdities.

• The Stoic philosophy of suicide inadvertently proves that externals do matter.

  • The Stoics have a well-developed theory of virtuous suicide: the sage kills himself when living itself would be virtuous. Cato killed himself after losing to Caesar — not because he feared torture or poverty, but because accepting Caesar’s clemency would have meant recognizing Caesar’s legitimacy, which would have been a betrayal of the Republic.
  • But this only makes sense if externals can indeed destroy the conditions for virtuous living. Seneca himself wrote: “If [the sage] encounters many hardships that banish tranquility, he releases himself.” This directly concedes that externals can banish a sage’s tranquility — the very thing Stoic ethics denies.
  • The argument only works because the Stoics refuse to distinguish between the lengths of virtuous lives. If you add the reasonable qualification that you want to keep living and be happy, the Stoics are forced to concede Aristotle’s point.

• The “preferred indifferent” doctrine is philosophically incoherent and practically indistinguishable from ordinary self-interest.

  • After declaring all externals indifferent, the Stoics reintroduce wealth, health, noble birth, and good looks as “preferred indifferents” — things the Stoic should “select” rather than “pursue” and “set aside” rather than “avoid.” They had to invent awkward new language to describe this view.
  • Compared to the Cynics, who congruently lived in poverty and rejected social conventions, the Stoics look bizarre — running around pursuing wealth and honor while claiming these things don’t matter. The Cynics rightly accused them of smuggling Roman values in through the back door.
  • The Stoic justification — that nature shows life goes smoother with health — is exactly the argument Aristotle had been making all along. If health makes life smoother, why doesn’t it factor into happiness?

Stoic Views on Human Nature Are Equally Extreme

• The Stoics believe you are just your soul, and your soul is essentially a rational computer.

  • Marcus Aurelius relays Epictetus: “You are a little soul dragging around a corpse.” You are not a living body, not a body animated by soul — you are just your soul, and your body is dead weight.
  • The soul operates by assenting to rational propositions. When you get angry from being shoved, you are actually running a logical syllogism: “Physical intrusions harm me. If I am harmed, it is appropriate to feel anger. A shove is a physical intrusion. Therefore, it is appropriate to feel anger.” The Stoics think all human behavior, emotion, and desire works this way.
  • This hyperrational view explains the binary structure of Stoic ethics: just as a computer program either compiles or doesn’t (one missing semicolon is as fatal as gibberish), your soul either has all the right assents or it doesn’t. Plato missing one assent is as corrupt as Hitler with a completely corrupt database.

• The intuition behind this view is genuinely valuable — it is the foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy.

  • CBT, which was largely inspired by Stoicism, works by uncovering the unproductive assents underlying emotional distress. Much of what seems non-rational in our lives is indeed grounded in rational propositions.
  • But the Stoics radicalized this to the nth degree. The debate is whether all motivation must go through reason. Most contemporary philosophers (and common sense) say no — habit, appetite, and emotion can motivate us directly without a rational syllogism.

• The Stoic view of human nature faces a massive developmental problem: how does a non-rational toddler become a fully rational adult?

  • A toddler feeling joy while breastfed is not assenting to “titties are good; if a good is present, I ought to feel joy.” The Stoics are forced to say that at age 7 or 14, a child goes to bed like an animal and wakes up fully rational — a transition they compare to a parrot suddenly becoming human. This is not plausible.
  • The deeper question — why are we just our souls, and why is our soul pure reason? — cannot be answered within Stoic ethics or Stoic human nature alone. It requires Stoic cosmic nature: Zeus.

Stoicism Is a Religion, and a Weak One at That

• Every seemingly benign Stoic doctrine ultimately depends on a cosmological commitment to Zeus — a rational, providential deity who permeates the cosmos.

  • “Focus on what is up to you” depends on virtue being the only thing that matters. Virtue being the only thing that matters depends on you being pure reason. You being pure reason depends on Zeus being pure reason and you sharing in his nature.
  • The Stoics believed in divine providence: Zeus has a benevolent plan, this is the best of all possible worlds, and we should be co-authors in that providence. This is why we pursue preferred indifferents — we imitate Zeus, who grows plants to feed animals and uses their corpses to nourish plants.
  • This is also why the death of your child is “affirmable” — it was a necessary step in the progress of the cosmos. If your child had lived, the world would have been worse (maybe your child would have become Hitler; maybe Zeus needed the kindergarten spot for the next Einstein).
  • The religious imperative supersedes the ethical one: if Zeus tells you to kill your child, you kill your child, just as with Abraham. The preferred indifferent of having children is overridden by divine command.

• Stoicism’s cosmological claims are no less extravagant than those of organized religion — but far less honest about the limits of reason.

  • The Stoics believed in eternal recurrence, cyclical big bangs and big crunches, divination, and intelligent design arguments for divine providence. They grounded all of this on natural philosophy and reason rather than revelation.
  • The speaker argues this is a weakness, not a strength. Christianity at least has the honesty to tell you that you are a “puny little earthworm” who cannot figure things out on your own — when God comes down to Job and says “Where were you when I was making the cosmos?” or when the Eagle of Justice tells Dante that even it doesn’t understand God’s plan. Stoicism grotesquely exaggerates what reason can do and offers syllogisms where humility is called for.

• The problem of evil applies to Stoicism just as much as to any other religion.

  • If this is the best of all possible worlds, then your vice is also affirmable — it was either impossible for you to act virtuously, or the world would have been worse if you had. The Stoic has no better resolution to this than any other theologian.

Why Keep Reading the Stoics?

• Despite thinking Stoicism is comically wrong, the speaker will keep reading it because its extremism is philosophically productive.
  • Imagine a spectrum: the speaker starts at 95% externals / 5% virtue. Aristotle says 95% virtue / 5% externals. The Stoics say 100% virtue / 0% externals. The Cynics go even further with no preferred indifferents at all.
  • It is precisely because the Stoics are so extreme that wrestling with them forces you to truly understand how important virtue is, how little externals matter, how out of control the world is, and how rational the human psyche is — even if not as extreme as the Stoics claim.
  • Reading Aristotle alone might make you complacent (“well, health matters, wealth matters, and if you’re not tall and good-looking with a deep voice, it’s over for you”). The Stoics shock you into the Aristotelian position in a way Aristotle cannot.
  • The Stoics themselves admired the Cynics in exactly this way — as “messengers from God” who, even though wrong, were wrong in the right direction and served as a useful reminder of what man is capable of. The speaker holds the same attitude toward the Stoics: they are admirably wayward friends who show us what man is capable of, even if that showing was unnecessary and unproductive.