The Big Problem with Stoicism

Stoicism is everywhere. Ted talks, Stoicons, stoicbros on Tiktok, Stoic quotes on Instagram, and across all platforms, the Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is seemingly dominated by one figure – Ryan Holiday and his Daily Stoic – 60 million Youtube views, 1.9 million Instagram followers, and several NYT bestsellers.

But is Stoicism all it’s cracked up to be? There are many things I admire about the Stoics and many things to admire about Holiday – but, ultimately, he often presents an emptied-out interpretation of Stoicism that reduces it to therapeutic self-help cliches. But the broader question is this: taking it seriously, is Stoicism faulty in the first place? Does it have some major flaws? Or is it a coherent view of the world?

One of the first things you’re unlikely to learn from Holiday is that the Stoics – starting with the Ancient Greek founder – Zeno – and the Greek philosopher Epictetus, through to the Roman Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca – had a philosophical system that was grounded in the worldview of the time.

As we’ll see, that’s a pretty long time ago.

The Ancient Greeks argued that being a Stoic required a study of ethics – which is loosely what Holiday talks about, but also logic, physics – in short, a study of nature and the world.

And the Stoics lived in a very different world to us, one that may have led to some faulty ideas that don’t necessarily translate to the modern age. The ancients had a lot of wisdom, but made a lot of mistakes too – remember, they worshiped different gods, believed in personal fate, didn’t understand nature as well as we do, and lived pretty violent, brutish, and short lives.

So let’s get stuck in. We’ll see what Stoicism is, how to think about it, ask how it emerged and look at what Ancient Greece and Rome was actually like, see what other philosophers like Nietzsche and Hegel had to say about the Stoics, look at where its contradictions might lie, and ask what it says about our own historical moment.

The foundation of Stoicism – where most start – is what has come to be known the ‘dichotomy of control’. It’s from the Greek philosopher Epictetus’s Enchiridion – or handbook – written in 125 AD.

Holiday says: ‘Epictetus says that the first task in life, the first job of the philosopher, is to separate matters into two buckets: what’s in our control and what’s not in our control. And this exercise, what we call the dichotomy of control, is really at the core of Epictetus’ teachings. Is it up to me? Is it not up to me?’.

Epictetus’s Enchiridion is famous for its first line: ‘Some things are up to us and some are not up to us’. Epictetus said that rather than worrying about things that aren’t up to us, we should focus on what we can control – ourselves.

Epictetus draws a dividing line between what some have called internals – things in our control – and externals – things out of our control.

He said, ‘things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our actions’.

We don’t have any say about what happens to us, but our judgements about what happens to us, our dreams, likes, desires, are in our control.

He said, for example, ‘I cannot escape death, but I can escape fear of it’.

In this formulation, death is an external – we have no control over when it happens – but fear of death is an internal – we can control whether we’re afraid of it or not.

The problem with this neat line between what we can and can’t control is that, on closer inspection, it becomes a little hazy. There are some things we have some control over, some things we could have control over, some things we can’t control now but someone else could, some things we could have control over if we thought through a way of doing so, and some things we didn’t have control over in the past but might be in the future.

Epictetus might tell me, for example, that I have no control over how many people will like this video, I only have control over how much effort I put into it.

Which sounds good, but actually, that means I do have some control over how many people like it. If I put effort into it, if I learn from past mistakes, if I look earnestly and deeply into the camera lens, into your eyes, and say ‘remember to like’, maybe more will, although, on second thought, at least don’t switch off. But you see the point – there are lots of things I can do to control an external factor.

This is true with everything – you might say you have no control over the people around you, your health, the media, political decision-making, nature, but everywhere you look, in some small way, you do – by engaging in small actions – convincing, arguing, building, engaging.

Everywhere you look the line between what you can and can’t control blurs – it looks like it’s not a distinct line at all.

This division comes out of the thought of Zeno of Citium, the very first Stoic, who set up his school of the Stoa in Athens in 301 BC.

In trying to work out what was truly good, Zeno looked at things that came from the external world – food, wealth, belongings, things like looks and talents that we’re born with and so still out of our control, still an external – and saw that all of things could be used for good or bad, so they could not be considered categorically and universally good. None of them can be consistently depended on either – they come and go, they’re fleeting.

The only thing that decides whether things are used or misused is us – that we do have control over – is our reason, our virtue, our good nature. All the rest – the external – we should be, he said, indifferent to. But again, this neat dividing line becomes blurry.

The problem is that it’s difficult to argue that we should be indifferent to things external to us and acknowledge that they are useful too – because, as much as it would be nice if we weren’t dependent on them, we are dependent on food, shelter, relationships, and so on.

And so Zeno had to say that we had to both be indifferent to them – they’re external and out of our control – and class them as what he called ‘preferred indifferents’ – that we should prefer to have them if we can.

As a result of this, the Stoic system comes up against a problem. In trying to categorise things as external and arguing for indifference to them, the philosophy has no way of truly valuing some things rather than others. It cuts the world off with a Stoic guillotine.

If you acknowledge a connection to something as part of yourself, your identity, your way of life, you’re dissolving that neat line the Stoics try to construct.

In valuing trees for building, nature for food, friendship for conversation, technology to aid, we’re acknowledging that the world isn’t external to us, but we’re part of it – as I say often, we’re nature reflecting on itself.

We need a way of valuing of things – which is where philosophy often comes in – because without a value system we have no basis for acting, for choosing, for thinking, and valuing – in its very definition, attachment – in valuing food we acknowledge that we need it, that we’re connected to it, it is part of us. Hope, need, want, desire, movement, life – all of these are all the result of value systems – connecting us to the outside world.

To divide the world, as we’ll see shortly, is to alienate ourselves from it. So the next question we should ask is why did the Stoics want to divide themselves from the world?

A central message of Stoicism is that life is short, unpredictable, difficult – that all things come and go, flourish then pass, rise and fall. Things in the universe are transitory.

‘All things human’, Seneca reminds us, ‘are short-lived and perishable’.

Buddhists argue that because of this we should let go of all desire, because desiring will only lead to disappointment. However, Stoics allowed for some desire – we should ‘view life’s conditions with joy’ as Seneca put it.

We should be very careful in what we desire, though. We should, for the most part, desire only two things – one is virtue – which for the Stoics means living according to nature – we’ll come back to that – and the other is tranquillity, eudaimonia, good spirit, calmness.

To find this sense of calmness, Seneca counselled that we should always reflect on the bad things that could happen to us. Misfortune, he said, is felt most by those who ‘expect nothing but good fortune’. So if we take note of or imagine the bad things that might happen to us before we start a task that might be frustrating or go on a journey where we might get stuck in traffic, the misfortune will have less of an impact on us if it occurs.

Epictetus, for example, says that as we care for our children we should also reflect on the possibility that they could die tomorrow.

So, on the one hand, we should remember that life is short, painful, harsh, frustrating – Marcus Aurelius reminded himself every morning that ‘the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly’, and remind ourselves, as Aurelius says, that ‘death hangs over you’, and we should remember that these things are externals – outside of spheres of influence.

Okay, there’s a good reason Seneca, Marcus, and Epictetus would be attracted to advice like this: they were Romans.

The Ancient World was, of course, a pretty harsh, unpredictable, frustrating, and fleeting one. Nothing was secure, life was capricious, dangerous, short. Hunger, pestilence, warfare, and tragedy were commonplace.

Take Seneca. Emperor Claudius condemned him to death after he’d supposedly had an affair with his niece. He decided instead to banished him and confiscated his property. Seven years later, Claudius’ new wife, Agrippina, convinced the Emperor to recall Seneca to tutor her son, Nero.

Seneca, of course, obliged and taught the young Nero some philosophical wisdom: mercy should be the basis of his rule, that his power should be shared with senators, he taught him about justice and the Stoic tradition. But Nero was vain, jealous, and insecure – he tormented, banished and executed his enemies. He murdered two wives. One was pregnant.

He tried to murder his own mother in a specially constructed boat that collapsed at sea – she survived so he had to send his guards to murder her instead. He tortured Christians in theatrical shows – some were torn apart by dogs.

Seneca for his part defended Nero after he’d murdered his mother.

Eventually, a conspiracy grew to have Nero replaced – 19 senators took part. Nero retaliated, eventually ordering Seneca to commit suicide.

The Stoic philosopher slit his wrists and died in the bath. Being a philosopher, after all, was an occupational hazard in antiquity. Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock to kill himself. The Emperor Domitian had banished all philosophers from the Roman Empire.

Eventually, parts of Rome revolted against Nero and the conspiracy to have him killed grew. He fled and committed suicide himself outside of Rome’s walls.

Nero gets a bad name, justifiably, but his rule wasn’t particularly exceptional. As Julius Caesar knew, in Rome, no-one could be trusted. Wives, bodyguards, friends, colleagues, slaves – all, at different times, murdered emperors. And they had good reason.

Roman Emperors tormented senators and aristocrats. At one dinner party, the emperor Gaius burst into spontaneous laughter and when asked what was funny replied, ‘just the thought that I would only have to nod and your throats would be cut on the spot’.

Domitian invited senators to a dinner party at which everything was painted black and the senators’ names were engraved in tombstone slabs. During the dinner the emperor taunted them by talking about nothing but death before simply sending them home. Not the best Friday night. He, in turn, was later slaughtered himself.

Domitian’s successor – Claudius – executed 35 senators. Caligula terrorised the senate and was eventually killed by senators and guards after numerous failed plots. Vespasian allegedly started the great fire of 64 AD to clear Rome for his new palace. Every succession was a crisis. The balance of power between emperor and the Senate constantly tested.

Incest, rape, and paedophilia were common. Fires and pestilence were frequent. Whether Nero fiddled while Rome burned or not, Rome did burn – for five days. Almost a quarter of it to the ground – half of Rome’s districts had only a few buildings standing.

After Spartacus’ revolt, 6000 slaves were crucified along a 120 mile stretch of road. Imagine – a crucified man in agony every 30 meters for 120 miles. Imagine the nightmare of walking for days along a main road past that. I think that’s one of the most brutal things I’ve heard from history – even the Nazis wouldn’t have dared do something like that.

With all of that in mind, is it any wonder Seneca wanted to remind himself daily of how harsh and fleeting the world was? Focusing on what was in his control might have been a good way to put the hazards of elite Roman life out of his mind.

Historian Barry Straus summarised it like this: ‘Nero’s Rome was rich, as no one knew better than he did. Yet beneath the opulence lay emptiness. Seneca and the Stoics understood inner peace as a solution’.

The dangers of antiquity are neatly summed up by the Roman saying, ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die’. Stoicism is not a philosophy of life, it is a philosophy of despair.

Another thing you might not get from watching someone like Holiday is that for the Ancient Greeks Stoicism was a philosophical system that was meant to include the study of logic, physics, and ethics – and that their ethics – the study of how we should act, the part that we most hear about today – relies on an ancient view of logic and physics, too.

Cicero, for example, wrote that the stoic system is ‘so well constructed, so firmly jointed and welded into one … [with] such close interconnection of the parts that if you alter a single letter, you shake the whole structure’.

Now, the Stoic view of physics included much more than our modern view of physics – it encompassed the study of nature, theology, the universe – how things worked – and, crucially – and this is what Cicero was getting at – the entire universe – the physics – was ordered exactly how God planned it.

That means that the ethics – how we should act – is in accordance with that plan. As Zeno said, to live a good, virtuous life we should act in accordance with nature.

Marcus Aurelius talks at numerous points in the Meditations about how we shouldn’t act against ‘nature’s law’ and how we all have a place in ‘nature’s scheme’, and how we shouldn’t rebel against nature and instead do what nature requires of us.

What follows from this? To live according to what nature requires – having a view of what nature is like, how things are ordered, what nature’s schema is.

And being grounded in a religious worldview, the ancient stoics believed wholeheartedly in fate – not just that they should accept what happens to them, or that our fate is out of our hands, but that our entire lives are mapped out by the gods. They believed in goddesses of fate: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos.

This is brought up a lot. Seneca said, ‘it is a great consolation that it is together with the universe we are swept along’. Epictetus said that we should want events to happen as they do happen. Holiday has a tattoo of the Stoic phrase ‘amor fati’ – love of fate – on his arm and sells an amor fati coin.

Aurelius said, ‘if the inward power that rules us be true to Nature, it will always adjust itself readily to the possibilities and opportunities ordered by circumstance’.

We should bend to nature rather than bending nature to ourselves.

What this means is that because everything is both out of our control but also ordered according to a plan, to fate, the only thing that can be out of step is our own souls – we are wrong, we have bad desires, bad reactions, incorrect judgements – and we must focus on our own internal soul and not the externally ordered god-given world. We should, according to Zeno, live in harmony with nature by changing ourselves to do so.

First, this is a very particular worldview – and you can see in it the Stoic influence on early Christianity; the concept of original sin, for example – that we are born wrong and have to work on ourselves to fix ourselves.

And all of this, while sounding good, ignores the fact that often the reverse is true – that we bend and mould nature and the world to our own desires as much as we bend ourselves to fit into nature’s plan. In other words, we shape the external world as much as it shapes us. We are, after all, a pretty handy species.

A dam is a great example – the Stoic view is that a flood is an act of god – an act of nature – and that to live in accordance with nature we should not live near somewhere that could be flooded, avoid arid land for crops, but live near water to fish in. But we also invent dams, bridges, sea defence, boats – we control nature, use nature, direct it for our purposes.

In his book on Stoicism, philosopher William Irvine says, ‘we can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment’.

But this is advice that can sound just as good in reverse. ‘We can either spend this moment resigned to acceptance, or we can fight to change it’.

Is this not the basis of engineering, science, progress?

Broadly speaking, fatalism has gone out of fashion. In history, for example, we no longer believe in what’s called teleology – that there is a predetermined end to history. Theological views of fate have also been contradicted by modern science. Astrology replaced by astronomy. Evolution, for example, is not teleological – it is random selection.

The idea that you should love your fate is also quite slavish.

Holiday says that you should not only love fate but say I’m going to be better for this happening to me. It’s the whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger mantra – it sounds good, but it’s demonstrably false – some things quite clearly harm us and don’t make us stronger – they should be rallied against, fought against, or avoided.

Should a slave love their fate? Or rally against their chains? Should women have not agitated for the vote? Should someone who loses a child, for example, or lives through a horrific war, or lives their life in servitude, really always say I am better off for this happening to me?

So Epictetus was a slave, Seneca was at the centre of a madman’s empire. What about the wise philosopher king, Marcus Aurelius?

Aurelius lived through one of the worst periods of Roman history; he had bad health, might have been an opium addict, had a wife who had affairs and supposedly slept with gladiators at their seaside villa. During his reign Rome was attacked by Parthians in the East leading to a 4 year war, then by Germanic peoples in the North, then by the Antonine Plague which killed millions from Europe to Asia – according to witnesses the dead were piled up outside homes as groans of agony came from inside.

The war with the Germanic tribes was bad – in one battle they defeated and killed twenty thousand Romans. To top it off, in 175 AD one of Aurelius’ generals rebelled, claiming the throne – most eastern Romans supported him and some sources even say that Marcus’ own wife took his side. The rebellion lasted months, and Aurelius was about to march east when luckily a centurion killed the general.

Marcus did not enjoy his job, admitted he had trouble controlling his anger, had a dim view of, and often seemed to despise, other people, and, to top it off, his son, Commodus – who was a bit of a disappointment to say the least – was assassinated not long after he took the throne.

No wonder Marcus was drawn to a philosophy that divided the world into internals and externals.

Historian Barry Strauss writes, ‘he could be harsh or capricious. He reinforced class distinctions. Persecution of Christians increased on the local level during his reign, and Marcus surely bears some responsibility’.

Living with the constant threat of treachery and pestilence, it is no surprise that Aurelius needed to meditate so carefully on the nature of death.

Is it any wonder that he told himself to ‘despise not death; smile, rather, at its coming; it is among the things that Nature wills’, or that he recommended to ‘take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature’.

In fact, Aurelius talks endlessly of death and dying, as if he’s trying to convince himself of something that he does in fact fear – as if the lady doth protest too much.

The Roman historian Cassius Dio tells us that, ‘he did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire’.

The philosopher J.A. Mollison sums it up like this: ‘if one suffers slavery, as Epictetus did, advises a violent and impulsive emperor, as Seneca did, or faces wars on multiple fronts, as Marcus did, then the invitation to turn away from the external world toward the inner citadel of reason may provide great comfort’.

But am I being unfair? Stoicism, as I said at the beginning, does still seem useful – there’s much to admire. That Stoicism has some important insights while also seeming to be incoherent can be seen in nineteenth century uber-chad Fredrich Nietzsche’s take on it.

In much of his work, Nietzsche takes inspiration from the Stoics – he actually likes the love of fate idea – he admires their self-sufficiency – with making yourself as resilient to external pressure as possible. He said, ‘we free spirits […] are the last of the Stoics!’.

But he also saw where it came from. He wrote that, ‘Stoicism may well be advisable for those with whom fate improvises and who live in violent times and depend on impulsive and dangerous people’.

And at other times he absolutely despises the Stoics – especially their view that emotions and passions are externals – things that happen to us – things we should fight against, things that are irrational compared to what’s important – living according to peaceful eudemonic virtue.

Nietzsche wrote that, ‘the primary intention of Stoic education: to annihilate easy excitability, to restrict more and more the number of objects that can affect [a person] at all, belief in the contemptibility and low worth of most things that arouse the passions, hatred and hostility against excitement, as if the passions themselves were a sickness or something ignoble: scrutiny for all ugly and distressing revelations of suffering—in sum: petrification as a remedy against suffering’.

He continues, saying that this view is repugnant to him because it ‘underestimates the worth of pain (it is as useful and beneficial as pleasure), the worth of excitation and passion’.

And he complains of the ‘indifference and stone column coldness which the Stoics prescribed and applied as a cure for the feverish idiocy of the emotions’.

The emotions and passions – what used to be referred to as the affects – things that affect you – come in many forms: joy, excitability, fear, anxiety, anger, love, zeal.

For the most part, the Stoics argued that they’re externals – that they happen to us – and that our reason and judgement is separate – that our souls are separate. Instead of indulging the passions too much we should seek tranquillity.

Holiday says, ‘and then often by being anxious, by being worried, by taking things personally, by being afraid, we are taking our eye off the ball. And so I want you to see those emotions not just as unpleasant, but actively destructive, because they are. Stuff’s going to happen in life that makes us emotional, but we have to realise that we are only compounding that by acting on those emotions’.

The Stoics adopt this mind-body dualism in which the mind is a spiritual soul and the body – and that includes the emotions – is capricious, unstable, wildly passionate.

This does not align with contemporary studies – the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, for example, has influentially argued that emotions are part of cognition – they’re not just part of being human – which they are – they’re part of how we reason – how we engage with and appraise the world.

Emotions, within reason, orient us in the world – the sudden fear of something directs our attention towards something that’s dangerous – hunger towards food, laughter towards friendship, passions and zeal and excitement towards projects and so on. Emotions colour the world for us – we shouldn’t push them down, we should listen to them, use them, live through them.

Holiday also says, ‘and then you realise oh, the anxiety has nothing to do with any of the things. Actually Marcus Aurelius talks about this in Meditations. He says ‘I escaped anxiety’, and then he goes, ‘no, actually I discarded it’. And he writes this during a plague, no less. But he goes, ‘I discarded it because it was within me’. That was a breakthrough I had. I was like oh I thought I was stressed and anxious and worried because of all of these very reasonable things that caused those things in your life – work, family stuff. And then when all of that gets pared down, you realise oh it was me’.

Now, of course, many emotions – like anything – can be harmful if they’re felt too much, if they take us over or negatively affect our lives. But I think saying that anxiety is about the person rather than, for example, what they went through, or the context, or a condition, can be a harmful message.

Sometimes anxiety is trivial, mistaken, sure, but sometimes anxiety can alert us to a real problem, a real danger, a real issue in the world.

What we feel as negative often has a positive value – it is important to feel. It’s important to travel through emotions rather than judge them or push them away.

What if suffering is important for empathy, pain important for pleasure, anger important for justice, sadness for processing loss, and so on? What if, in short, it is important to feel?

Nietzsche’s Übermensch Zarathustra says: ‘in order for the creator to be, suffering is needed and much transformation’.

He continues: ‘the tremendous tension imparted to the intellect by its desire to oppose and counter pain makes him see everything he now beholds in a new light’… ‘with dreadful clearsightedness as to the nature of his being, he cries to himself: ‘[…] Raise yourself above your life as above your suffering, look down into the deep and the unfathomable depths!’’.

Several studies back up this idea that we need to feel a full range of emotions to have a balanced life. Emotions help us to evaluate what happens to us. One study found that alcoholics who tried to supress thoughts and feelings about alcohol tended to have more of them. Another study found that those who tried to push back negative emotions had more of them in comparison to those that accepted that they were feeling upset or agitated. Another study has found that accepting anxiety was a better way to overcome it. Another found that those who got stressed about a job interview or exam led to them better preparing for the task – getting them to ‘cheer up’ actually led to them perform worse on a task. And another study found that pessimists were less likely to experience depression than optimists after a bad life event.

What this shows is that emotions are a complex but important part of our lives – for better and worse. This is not to justify being an angry or pessimistic or melancholic person – it’s just to say that we often underestimate the reasons we’re feeling a certain way and fail to appreciate or analyse or work through or experience them properly.

Nietzsche summed it up: ‘the passions have been brought into ill repute on account of those who were not sufficiently strong to employ them’.

What if, instead of positing death as something to resign to, life as something fleeting, emotions as something to overcome, and nature as something fatalistic that happens to us, we instead see ourselves as something connected to and in a positive relationship with the world, ourselves shaping it, changing it, moulding it, using it, protecting it. What if, rather than being indifferent and limiting what we value, we actively value – we make leaps of passionate faith – we say, yes I want this. We acknowledge that we’re moved by and move the world. What if, rather than amor fati – rather than loving fate – we rage against it, we say pugna fati – fight fate.

In a notebook, Nietzsche wrote sarcastically, ‘so you want to live ‘according to nature?’ Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, … Living—isn’t that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different?’.

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also had a dim view of the Stoics. He too believed it was a particularly Roman way of seeing the world – a world which was divided into masters and slaves. He argued that Stoicism emerged from slave consciousness.

The slave, oppressed by its master, turns inwards to the only true freedom they have – their own thought – the only thing no-one can take away from them. This leads to scepticism – to always saying no to everything external – turning away from it and to something else – and, ultimately, to an unhappy consciousness that denies its connection to god and the world.

The Stoic slave says, yes, there might be events in the world that seek to dominate me, that seek to destroy or manipulate me, yes the world is bad, but my judgements are always free, and so the slave puts up a psychological wall of self-defence. But it cannot account for an important fact –no matter how high and well constructed the wall is, the world keeps happening to it.

It keeps desiring, wanting, needing, feeling, knowing, and the pressures and challenges of the world keep bumping against it, daring it to engage with the world, to change the conditions in which it finds itself – to drive history forward. Why else do we invent things and make our cases?

As philosopher Bernard Reginster writes: ‘the creative individual […] deliberately seeks to confront and break boundaries, to expand the domain of human experience, to overcome limitations hitherto unchallenged, or to vanquish resistance perhaps thought unassailable’.

Rather than say, ‘it’s not that this thing that’s happened to me is bad, it’s only my judgement of it that’s bad’, we should put our chips on the table and say, ‘my judgement of this thing as being bad is true! I’m going to go out on a limb and fight for it, make the case – this law, this convention, this idea, this poison is bad’.

In making a value judgement about something we make plans – we think through into the future – about what sort of lives we want to lead, what we want to design, build, write, what sort of friendships we might want or where we want to go and how we might get there.

Stoicism advises to live in the moment – as if each could be your last – memento mori. ‘Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life’, as Aurelius said.

Again, this sounds good but it’s not a comprehensible philosophy. No action makes sense without reference to a longer plan. What if, instead, we lived every act of our lives as if we were going to live a lifetime. Is this not more life-affirming? To live as if we are making each moment part of a greater whole – thinking through our long term plans, projects and goals.

Living each day as if it is your last – as if life is fleeting and you may be slaughtered by a Roman emperor or barbarian horde at any moment – is incoherent. We can only live with dreams.

Historian Henry Gruber makes this point in reference to Seneca – who in the midst of war, sees his estate given to plunder, his daughters outraged by the enemy, and his native city taken over by the enemy.

Seneca says, ‘amid swords flashing on every side and the uproar of soldiers bent on pillage, amid flames and blood and the havoc of the smitten city, amid the crash of temples falling upon their gods, one man alone had peace’.

As Gruber says, this is a horrific passage. All this is happening and yet ‘the sage stands unmoved’.

Amor Fati? No, pugna fati – plan, dream, live, desire, hope, fight – against it.

To understand why Stoicism is having a resurgence we should think about our own moment and its relationship to philosophy.

Modernity – the rise of science, democracy, industry, technology – is about one thing more than anything: control. Science and technology, in particular since the Enlightenment, has been about what the sociologist Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment of nature’ – demystifying the world in order to understand and increasingly have some control over it –we understand physics to build machines and infrastructure, understand the elements, control diseases with medicines, study geology and extract minerals, design blueprints, rationalise transport networks, and so on.

But postmodernity questions this control. How much have we really tamed the world? Neoliberalism and digital financial markets mean that capital moves quickly and unpredictably around the planet through stock markets, governments have little control over global prices and investments, banks pretend to be in control but the 2008 crash proved otherwise, Iraq and Afghanistan proved that the US is not as in control of international affairs as it thought, in a post-truth world facts are constantly up for dispute, a pandemic reminded us that we aren’t as in control of disease as we think, and, everywhere we have to go through the world giving up our own individual control to experts. We get on planes without knowing anything about them, we don’t know how our phones work, we listen to scientists and experts and put our trust in them, or not.

In other words, we’re bombarded with even more of those Stoic externals – things outside of our control.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes that, ‘the dominant sentiment is now the feeling of a new type of uncertainty – not limited to one’s own luck and talents, but concerning as well the future shape of the world, the right way of living in it, and the criteria by which to judge the rights and wrongs of the way of living’.

Combine this with falling living standards, stagnant wages for decades, rising inequality, and a period of unprecedented technological and social disruption, and we have some explanation as to why neo-Stoicism is everywhere.

With so much change we might know as little about our world and what to expect as the Romans did.

But at the same time, the new media landscape means that more and more people have access to philosophy and new ideas more than ever. And if Stoicism was one of the first philosophical systems and one of the simplest, maybe we’re seeing the beginning of a great interest in philosophy – a new renaissance.

Defenders will say that the Stoics didn’t actually advocate resignation from that world – they were active participants – explorers and school-builders and emperors. But is not my point. It is, of course, impossible to resign from life. And their philosophical system reflects that contradiction. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be read, studied, engaged with, or that they don’t have some useful insights.

But we should remind ourselves that Stoicism was a philosophy of despair, adopted by an elite cabal of bickering and brutal bronze age warlords who believed in goddesses of fate and had no understanding of science, change, progress – it was one of our first philosophies.