Thomas M. Ward
n the early 2010s, a Stoic revival set in among the Silicon Valley crowd. The revival continued through the Covid-19 pandemic. Contemporary expositors of Stoicism continue to find huge audiences through books, podcasts, and social media. The revival of interest in Stoicism that started in a techy niche is now fully mainstream. “Broicism” is a thing. Devoted as we are to #gains, whether in finance or fitness, the modern attraction to this most austere ancient philosophy is somewhat surprising.
Why Stoicism, and why now? It is easy to point to current events: extreme domestic polarization, geopolitical unrest, climate catastrophes, and economic uncertainties. It is unsurprising that many would welcome a method for unburdening oneself of the emotional distress our hard times induce. Yet hard times don’t fully explain the rise of Stoicism. Times are always hard.
For a better answer, it is instructive to consider that our current Stoic moment began right about the time smartphones and social media had become ubiquitous in American life.
Stoicism is a philosophy well-suited for coping with the social isolation these technologies foster. We’re not going back to the analog world of tight-knit extended families or church socials or village squares, not anytime soon, anyway. Increasingly, we live in households of one. We need to find a way to manage the burden of being alone with ourselves and our phones. Stoicism has something to say about that.
The Stoics taught that desirable things such as wealth, status, popularity, and good health do not guarantee contentment. They also taught that the lack of these things does not guarantee misery. The secret to contentment, they say, is your character. If you are unhappy, the problem is not your circumstances, but you. Wherever you go, you always take yourself with you. And as long as that is not good company, you will always feel like you are missing out.
The sort of character that can be good company, according to the Stoics, is the character perfected by virtue. Of all the virtues that are worth having, Stoics focused on four, sometimes called the “Four Cardinal Virtues”: prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. Having these virtues makes it easier to enjoy the good ephemera of life. You’ll be content with what you’ve got and not overdo it. When things get hard, you won’t slink away in fear or despair. The modern Stoic revival retains this emphasis on virtue, but the virtue of justice is somewhat downplayed, and the other virtues get boiled down to a generic sort of self-discipline, the overarching character trait you need to reach your ambitious #lifegoals.
Not long ago, I met a friend who shares an interest in Stoicism for dinner specifically to discuss the modern revival of the old Roman ethos. He had brought a book by one of Stoicism’s modern expositors. Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny lay there on the table as we talked. Our server, a young man, approached. “I love that book!” he said. “Why?” my friend asked. The reply was as underwhelming as the book: “I have goals, and the book inspires me to achieve them.”
Modern revivalists promise that the master of Stoic virtue will be able to enjoy all the utility and stimulation of a tech-mediated life without suffering from the distraction, compulsion, and social isolation it fosters. In a society of empty office buildings, laptop coffee shops, and households of one, the solitary Stoic master can enjoy the quiet and tidiness without the restlessness or terror of loneliness. All influencer, under no influence. Doomscrolling without the gloom. As your crypto portfolio rises and falls, as you face challenging obstacles in your favorite RPG, however many views your YouTube video gets or likes your TikTok workout clip receives, you’ll have the discipline to be neither too elated nor too bothered, and to keep pressing on. You got this.
The logic of this neo-Stoic view is that, as long as you are pursuing your self-interest in a self-disciplined way, nothing else truly matters. As the Stoics were fond of saying, everything besides good character is simply indifferent. Some indifferent things are preferable to other indifferent things, but they are all indifferent.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus in his Handbook counseled his students to think of their closest relations not as wife or son but simply as humans: “If you kiss a child of yours or your wife, tell yourself that you’re kissing a human being, because then you won’t be upset if they die.” You shouldn’t make too much of other people, just as you shouldn’t make too much of a delectable crustacean or mushroom: “If you have a dear wife or child given you, they are like the shellfish or the truffle, they are very well in their way.” Marcus Aurelius graciously acknowledged the lessons and gifts his friends and family members bestowed upon him, but his Meditations is much more focused on a generic love for humanity than for any particular humans. And even the most sociable Stoic, Seneca, recognized that while friendships can be good, intimate friendships are obstacles to self-sufficiency and must be avoided.
Stoics who have cultivated detachment from people and from things outside their control are supposed to be content no matter what: for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, you are indissolubly wedded to the one good thing you cannot lose—yourself—till death do you part.
One of the last Roman philosophers, Boethius, intuited these shortcomings even as he admired aspects of Stoicism. In his masterpiece, The Consolation of Philosophy, he concedes that a virtuous life indeed equips you to be untroubled by the ups and downs of life. But, says he, virtue alone cannot make you truly happy. Our desires stretch beyond the merely negative state of freedom from suffering. We want something positive: happiness. Not a happy mood (which comes and goes), but deep-down joy, well-being, “beatitude,” as Boethius calls it. This elusive, positive state cannot be found in the self-wedded life. To find it, we must go outside ourselves.
Personhood is a form of life that cannot flourish in isolation. Our relationships with other people are not “indifferent,” as the Stoics would have it. Boethius wrote that friendship is “the most sacred good.” This includes friendship with other people, of course, but extends to friendship with the divine, if it is there to be found. “All real living is meeting,” as a more recent philosopher has quipped. However good company you are to yourself, you aren’t enough for yourself. Boethius’s renovated Stoicism, therefore, cuts against the grain of the isolating forces of modern life.
Boethius endorsed Stoicism as a deconstructive program of detaching ourselves from those impersonal things outside our control in which we are liable to place our hope for happiness: wealth and material possessions, sensual pleasures, and social prestige and honors. However preferable these may be to their alternatives, they cannot make us happy, and this for two reasons: they always leave us wanting more, and our enjoyment of them is contingent not just on our own actions but on fickle fortune.
But it’s one thing to recognize that these “goods of fortune” cannot make us happy, and another thing to become the sort of person who does not seek happiness in these things. (Analogously, it is one thing to recognize that smoking cigarettes is harmful and another thing to break a smoking addiction.) The Stoic recommendation for breaking an addiction to goods of fortune is a practice of recollection: we must regularly keep before our minds the truth about what we are and the false promises of fortune’s goods—hence the aphoristic quality of so much Stoic writing: nuggets of wisdom better suited for meditation than philosophical analysis. A person who is regularly recollected in this way then finds it easier to undertake the ascesis that will eliminate desire and establish tranquility.
But for Boethius, tranquility is not an end but a means. He goes beyond Stoicism in offering a constructive program of attaching ourselves to things that really can make us happy. Only those things at least as noble as ourselves—persons—are worthy of our attachment. The kind of thing we are is not merely a “rational mortal animal” as all the philosophers teach, but a social creature made to be in union with others and with God. He teaches that all human action aims, if only implicitly, at self-transcendence, going outside or beyond oneself, finding one’s own good in the good of others.
When Boethius languished in prison, the thought of virtuous and happy family members brought genuine consolation: their good was his good. But his ultimate consolation was the hope of union with God, a union by which the mortal animal shares in divinity and so becomes blessed as God is blessed: God’s goodness will be his.
Whereas the Stoic sage encourages recollected ascesis for the sake of tranquility, the Boethian adept aims at tranquility as a precondition for directing one’s affections toward these highest goods—interpersonal goods in the enjoyment of which the human form of life flourishes best. Boethius, therefore, invites us to set our aim higher than mere freedom from suffering; to aim at the true happiness that can only be found in real-life communion. There is short-term risk here: of loss, disappointment, betrayal, wishful thinking; but greater reward: friendship, love, joy.
Mass society seems increasingly unwilling to take the risk. In failing to do so, we must recognize that we are settling for the sort of life that makes us ideal consumers of the latest tech, acquiescent occupants of built environments ever more hostile to community life. One of the tenets of Stoicism is that everything that happens in the world is fated to happen. All there is for us to do is to control our reactions to fate, not let it get us down.
This fatalism might be cosmic, but maybe in the end it’s just economic. We can’t stop Apple or Meta or Google or OpenAI from re-engineering our social world; the best we can do then is to develop the virtues we need to exercise whatever genuine agency they leave available to our atomized selves. Maybe the Stoic revival is just marketing. We can do better. Boethius can help.
* Thomas M. Ward is associate professor of philosophy in the School of Civic Leadership at The University of Texas at Austin, and the author of After Stoicism (2024).
Source: https://lawliberty.org/stoicism-and-the-technology-of-loneliness/
