Back in the 1990s, Phoenix writer Mark Athitakis was feeling adrift.
He'd just graduated from college, and he was trying to figure out where he fit in the world. A friend suggested he should check out "The Manual," by the Roman writer Epictetus.
Epictetus was a firm believer in stoicism. Stoicism is a centuries-old philosophical framework, but it's more popular than ever these days, thanks to a constellation of social media influencers, YouTubers and podcasters.
Athitakis recently wrote about stoicism's resurgence in the Washington Post. He talked with The Show about why this ancient school of thought first resonated with him.
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MARK ATHITAKIS: Its largest prescription was that you were pretty much on your own, that you were training yourself to understand that death was coming for you, death was coming for us all, and that we were supposed to bear it and bear whatever negative things happened to us in the course of our lives.
SAM DINGMAN: Wow. So I have to say, you know, just thinking about my own state of mind after I graduated from college, which was not so long after you did, I think that sentiment of you're on your own, like it's as overwhelming as you think it is, would have been totally paralyzing, but you did not feel that way?
ATHITAKIS: I think it is a philosophy that appeals to introverts. I mean, Marcus Aurelius has, I'm trying to find the family friendly way of describing it, but he will describe, you know, sex as just an exchange of fluids, that love is something that is mainly a distraction. And often, some of the more severe stoics would say that, you know, if your spouse dies, if your child dies, you should not be thinking of it as any much different than as if you've broken a jug. That you should learn to just accept that things are going to break, lives are going to end, and the best thing that you can do is just accept.
DINGMAN: But I can see there being something very appealing about that practice of acceptance, and especially at a time in life when you are being forced to countenance, maybe for the first time, that we exist in chaos. We exist in mystery. We have no control over what's going to happen, including the worst things we can imagine, like death, and that's the baseline.
ATHITAKIS: Oh, absolutely. And I think there's no doubt that part of the reason why stoicism, in its current form, is so appealing, there is a certain comfort. And I think this is what the modern stoics take advantage of, that you know, here's somebody who is writing from a position of moral certainty and attempting a total awareness of the negative things that can happen in our lives, and is trying to draw up a way of managing your way through it that is sensible, practical, and that keeps us from losing it emotionally.
DINGMAN: In your piece, you kind of marvel at this, let's call it a renaissance, that stoicism is having, and the particular folks who are at the forefront of propagating these ideas. So give us some examples of who those folks are and how they're deploying these ideas.
ATHITAKIS: Well, I think you can't have a conversation about stoicism today without talking about Ryan Holiday, who developed this cottage industry around stoicism, where he is deliberately popularizing and simplifying stoic philosophy and really trying very hard to distill it into more of a self-help philosophy, The Daily Stoic. I forget how many millions of followers it has on Instagram, but it is built on a lot of those sort of, like, kind of two sentence, quick hit memes about, you know, that Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or Epicitus might deliver.
And it doesn't get too much into the harsh stuff in the same way that, you know, maybe sometimes a lot of church sermons don't get into the really dark stuff in the Old Testament, it becomes this sort of like Profiles in Courage, like just recommendations about here's how great leaders and great people managed to achieve what they did. And it seems very simplistically descriptive.
DINGMAN: Yeah. One of the interesting tensions that I was fascinated by in your piece is there's this idea in vintage stoicism of moral excellence as a sort of universal value. And it seems to me that this Holiday, a lot of the time is writing about commitment to one's own moral compass at all costs, yeah, which is sort of a different idea?
ATHITAKIS: Yeah, there's a certain sort of ruthless vibe. This is where the Ryan Holiday philosophy sort of drifts into the world of the Tony Robbins seminar that, that there is a lack of grit, or there is a lack of awareness of your need to be. Stop whining and get to it. And that's a little bit different from arming yourself to be ready for having a difficult life. It's a little bit of a flip from that.
DINGMAN: Two other versions of this modern iteration of stoicism. You actually have concrete examples here in front of you. Can you tell us what those are?
ATHITAKIS: I'm sure I am looking at a copy of “Stoicism for Dummies.” So, this came out in January. And so when I saw this, that was the thing that prompted me is like, you know, have we achieved peak stoicism now that we have, like, an official manual for the manual?
The second thing that I'm looking at, and this came out last around the holiday season last year, is a deck of cards that is published by The School of Life, which you may know. They do various YouTube videos, and they put together a deck of cards that is just, it's a black and white deck called Stoicism, and it is filled with quotes from various stoics of you know, of the ancient sort, with some explanatory material as well.
DINGMAN: So do you recognize any of the stoicism that you were once drawn to in these sort of watered down versions of it that people are engaging with now?
ATHITAKIS: I think, to the extent that all of this, everybody who is doing stoicism today, it's trying to get away from the death struck notion of classic stoicism, which, to be fair, you know Marcus Aurelius was writing as a one-time war general, and at a time when life expectancy was much shorter, death was coming much closer to your life, sure at that time.
So I think maybe people are looking for a counterweight to the doom scrolling that, you know, you are inflicted with all sorts of bad news, negativity, etc, etc. So it doesn't behoove the modern stoic to say, well, death is coming for you. Did you know that? So the memes are a little bit more about, you know, kind of girding yourself, and it's more spine straightening sort of stuff.
DINGMAN: So to wrap up, I have the deck of cards that you brought into the studio here, and I'm just gonna draw one at random, OK, and I'm gonna hand it to you and have you read it to us and ask for your reaction.
ATHITAKIS: Sure, all right.
DINGMAN: So I'm flipping through the card.
ATHITAKIS: I like how we are treating this like poker.
DINGMAN: And let's go with this one.
ATHITAKIS: OK. very good. So what do we have here? We have a quote from Seneca: “Winter brings on cold weather and we must shiver. Summer returns with its heat and we must sweat. We cannot change this order of things, that which you cannot reform. It is best to endure.”
And so this is stoicism at its most Spock like, right? You know, these things are going to happen. The world has its order. You can't shake your fist at God and say that it needs to be different. You're just going to have to learn how to, you know, accept things as they come. So, you know, not necessarily bad advice.
But again, if you want to get all in on these guys, you have to get along with the notion that you have to perceive your wife is no different than an earthenware jug, or that if a child dies, that it's just as well that happened.
DINGMAN: But of course, there's, there's another key irony here to this social media stew where folks are encountering these ideas, which you write about in your piece, which is that one of the principles of the original stoics was, and I quote, “never be keen to please the crowd.”
ATHITAKIS: Yes.
DINGMAN: So like, this stuff was not supposed to be popular?
ATHITAKIS: No, no, it was not supposed, it was not supposed to be popular. It was supposed to be taken with, you know, a measure of disinterest. It was always very skeptical of the wider world. It was always very skeptical of what the crowd was thinking. And so you were always supposed to be girding yourself against that.
