You Don’t Want Stoicism

‘Why did you assume plumage not your own? Why did you call yourself a Stoic? Observe yourselves thus in your actions, and you will find of what sect you are. You will find that most of you are Epicureans; a few are Peripatetics, and those but loose ones.’

Epictetus, Discourses

Stoicism is very popular nowadays and is being sold from all corners as the solution to all your problems, but this is because most people who are selling Stoicism don’t seem to understand what it is or what they are. They are not Stoics. They are actors; they are children playing at dressing up, so lost in their game of make believe that they have forgotten to go to school.

You want to be happy, to be wealthy, to be successful, to be liked and admired, to be popular, to be good looking, fit, and healthy. You want to be a ‘better professional’. You are trying to get what you want, and you think Stoicism will help you. But a Stoic doesn’t try to get what they want; they try to want what they get. If you are ugly, a Stoic should want to be ugly. If you are poor, a Stoic should want to be poor. If you are hated and despised, a Stoic should want to be hated and despised. This is what it takes to align your will with nature: to want what is, not what you think ought to be; to want things to be as they will be, not to want things to be as you would like them to be. That is Stoicism.

You are poor, you are ugly, you are unsuccessful, you are unpopular, you are unwell. These are all matters of indifference to you, as a Stoic. They are not things to be fixed or changed. Only your opinions should be fixed and changed: those faulty opinions that tell you that these ‘external’ things matter. They do not matter. They are literally nothing to you, because you are not these things. You are something else: you are a will and a perspective, equipped with the powers of reason and desire and aversion, and you can use your reason to govern your desires and aversions. You cannot make yourself rich, but you can make yourself content to be poor by coming to understand that material wealth has no real value. You cannot make yourself good looking, but you can make yourself content to be ugly by coming to understand that the appearance of things has no real value. You cannot make yourself successful, but you make yourself content to be unsuccessful by coming to understand that ‘success’ in external terms is worth nothing in comparison to the success you can win by becoming a master of yourself. You cannot make yourself popular, but you can make yourself content to be unpopular by coming to understand that the opinions of other people are worthless and cannot affect you unless you let them; and are you content to enslave yourself to their ignorant opinions? You cannot make yourself healthy, but you can make yourself content to be ill by coming to understand that illness is a natural part of being alive.

Stoicism works, not because it gets you what you want, but because it changes what you want; it changes what you understand you should want. You should not want to be rich, you should not want to be successful, you should not want to be good looking, you should not want to be popular, you should not want to be physically healthy, because if you understand these things properly then you would understand that they have no real value. They might seem nice, but they do not really matter; they are ‘preferred indifferents’, as a Stoic would say.

You should want what actually matters and has value, which is only to have good judgement and to live in accordance with that good judgement; you should want only to be wise. And in being wise, you recognise that you should want things to go only as they will go. If you are a real Stoic then you will understand that there is no other way that they can go: it has all been fated since the initial conditions of the universe and you are just along for the ride, like a dog tied to a cart. And you can go along contentedly or not; that is your choice. But that is your only choice, because everything else is beyond your power to affect.

The only thing you can control is your internal self: your opinions, your desires, your aversions, or, in a word, your activity as a thinking thing. You can only do what a thinking thing does, which is: think. And you can do this well or badly, that is up to you, that is always up to you, and it’s the only thing that is up to you in a world where everything else is causally determined. So choose to think well or badly. If you want to think well, then follow the Stoics, but all they can offer you is wisdom. If you want anything other than that then you are a fool and they cannot offer you foolish things.

What they offer is inestimably more valuable than the childish games of make believe that say that if you get this or that then you will be happy. They offer you happiness that depends only on what you already have: your capacity for rational thought. In this, they offer you an absolute freedom and an invulnerability to misfortune. They can liberate you from a slavery that you have chosen for yourself. You choose to want things that have no value, then get frustrated when they don’t satisfy; you choose to suffer the consequences of your mistakes. You have bought yourself debts and burdens and by your ignorance you have forged your own chains. Free yourself from these chains. Understand yourself as you are (a thinking thing), understand the world as it is (causally determined), and align yourself with these things. Then you will be as free as you can be, as wise as you need to be, and you will be happy with this and nothing more.