If you spend time on social media and have any inclination at all toward philosophy, you’ll no doubt have seen memes featuring a Greek or Roman bust, along with a brief quote from stoic philosophy. In broad terms, stoicism is a system of thought which seeks to achieve mastery of the self amid life’s inescapable hardships. While there is certainly practical wisdom to be gained by studying the ancients, the content shared around these days is often divorced from its proper context for ease of consumption, as regularly happens online.
Many young men are drawn to stoicism as a counter to our overly feminized culture, but they frequently fall into a diluted, commercialized relationship with it, taking on the outward aesthetic without understanding the circumstances that created it.
The ancient stoics lived in a far more brutal world than our own where violence, deprivation, and death were daily facts of life. This undoubtedly shaped their perception of existence in ways most modern people can’t fully comprehend or relate to. Therefore, while we should appreciate the insights that can be found, I also believe we should be careful when trying to embody a philosophy which was formulated in a starkly different era of human development.