What Is Stoicism, and How Can It Help You Live a Better Life?

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a lot of time on their hands. Obtaining vital resources wasn’t much of a concern for the higher classes. Instead of planking or pondering how best to acquire youtube followers as the boredest of us do today, many devoted themselves to logic and philosophy. Thinkers aimed to become happy moral, and prudent, or, in other words, the best versions of themselves.

What Does Stoic Really Mean?

Stoicism is often Misunderstood and has recently become synonymous with "emotionlessness" among the general public. This isn’t quite right, but it isn’t entirely wrong either. Stoicism does emphasize endurance in the face of hardship. While it doesn’t discourage having emotions, it cautions against letting them run your life.

Stoicism is a much broader philosophy than the modern term “stoic” would suggest. The Roman thinkers who founded it presented it as a system of thought and behavior. It was a guidebook for endurance, self-mastery, and knowledge, not some obscure field of academic rumination, like some of today's scholarly "theory." Even today, everyday people can employ Stoicism to live a successful life.

In short, the philosophy uses reasoning to understand and overcome one's environment while sustaining a persistent mental fortitude.

Where Does Stoicism Come from?

Early Aristotelian thinkers invented the term "Stoicism." Between the Greek and Roman ages, it transformed from one respected philosophical field into the most widely respected. By the time of stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, culture had changed, and average citizens had become willing to engage in existential discussions. As with Socrates' concept of "knowing oneself," Stoicism could easily be understood by regular people, though its major tenants were quite detailed.

Early Stoics considered perception to be the foundation of all knowledge. While a thinker could use this knowledge to understand themselves, they could equally use it to describe the world around them. Everything in the world was a perceptual object. The final and most irreducible object of all was logic.

The Four Simple Stoic virtues:

Wisdom

We understand wisdom today differently than our ancient ancestors did. Where you probably consider it to be a kind of medium between book learning and lived experience, ancient philosophers saw the world as a collection of evil temptations or impulses and correct, rational decisions. To be wise was to turn away from lesser impulses and adopt rational choice instead. This required one to know what was the correct and incorrect course of action.

Wisdom was a kind of knowledge that provided the freedom to identify the higher action, or, in the words of one Greek source, “of what we ought to choose, what we ought to beware of, and what is indifferent.”

Temperance

Temperance, or restraint, is a value that we struggle with today as much as ancient people did thousands of years ago. To temper our basic impulses requires both knowledge (wisdom) and dedicated practice. The stoic might ask themselves, “would the best version of myself buy another drink?” By declining excess, the citizen-philosopher gives themself the freedom of rational choice. Turning down a drink might provide an opportunity to study, exercise, or care for a family. From this purely logical perspective, this is only one correct choice.

Justice

Justice is perhaps the most complicated of the stoic virtues, but it's the one that Marcus Aurelius considered to be the most important. Broadly, justice requires that the philosopher act with kindness, consideration, and fairness. The practitioner of justice should not only apply it to themselves but to everyone around them.

Courage

Courageous acts are only courageous because they are difficult — otherwise, they would be simple, and no one would take note of them at all. True courage, as some say, is being afraid and acting anyway, not acting without fear. In this sense, courage is a classically stoic virtue, and it’s the one we most associate with the narrow, modern term “stoic.” In the face of death, adversity, illness, and pain, the stoic continues on anyway.

How Is Stoicism Relevant Today?

Unlike many of the stranger philosophies and polytheistic religions of the Hellenistic age, Stoicism has remained highly relevant throughout the ages. Though the average citizen might not know all of the four virtues or the suite of logical processes ancient Roman thinkers once prescribed, millions of people still practice the ancient philosophy, whether they know it or not.

Jordan Peterson — a controversial figure to some and a beloved modern philosopher to others — has recently espoused many ideas based firmly on ancient Stoicism. In his book, 12 Rules of Life, he offers solutions for dealing with life’s unavoidable hardships. He urges readers enduring difficult times to deliberately accept greater burdens. He encourages them to pursue sacrifice instead of simple pleasure. Though some of these ideas are blended with modern psychology, they’ve brought stoic philosophy into somewhat of a renaissance.

Peterson and others have also repopularized the ancient dichotomy of chaos and order. In case you've somehow forgotten, the earth is an infinitely complex spinning ball in the middle of an infinitely complex cosmos. This is a terrifying reality that mankind has constructed intricate institutions to avoid ruminating on. The modern stoic argues against this kind of avoidance, which he or she sees as cowardly. Instead, he or she adopts “genuine responsibility and nobility,” among other positive mindsets. In doing so, he or she can master his or herself.

Is Modernity in Conflict With Stoicism?

Modernity has changed people's worldviews, especially in how they view order and chaos. Science teaches us that chaos is inevitable, but philosophy says otherwise. Among Stoicism's founding ideas is the allegory that the universe is a large city. Those who live in the city have a responsibility to regulate what is in it.

Where other philosophies and sciences argue against mankind’s place, Stoicism justifies it by contending that people can maintain the universe — or at least the perceptual one they find most important — by following correct social conventions and adhering to behavioral principles.

Stoicism sees people are intimately and fundamentally linked to the universe, and this fact, at least, is compatible with modern sciences and attitudes. The humanism, unity, and acceptance that modern academic institutions seem to love above much else are also arguably stoic values. It is both just and rational, for example, to treat individual groups based on their similar essence and the value of their reasoning, rather than on more basic biases or prejudices.

Many years after the demise of the great Stoic institutions, essential elements of its thought have resurfaced and have been integrated into current thinking. Stoicism was never fully developed as a philosophical framework like certain religions or ancient ideas, and this might have been the best thing that could have happened to it. Now we can apply our modern frameworks to it instead, allowing it to work for us, not the other way around.

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