As America slowly moves on from being a majority Christian nation, I’m always curious to see what pops up in its place, whether it’s Gen-Zers obsessed with astrology or Tech Bros trying to make big bucks cribbing from ancient philosophy. In the last year, Effective Altruism has come under fire for its involvement with corrupt FTX founder Sam Bankman Freed and its preoccupation with the AI apocalypse. But it’s not just Peter Singer’s philosophy that has been warped by the internet masses; Stoicism is trending with all the wrong people, namely Men’s Rights Activists and Jordan Peterson fans. Enter the Rise of Bro-icism.
It is, at some level, a natural pairing. Stoicism is often interpreted in the popular imagination as John Wayne’s unquavering lip curled around its cigarette; it denotes a triumph over mere feelings in favor of rationality. This image dovetails nicely with many Evangelical messages on gender. Growing up, I heard again and again that women are ruled by emotions and—gasp! —hormones. Men, on the other hand, are logical. That’s why they get to be in charge of everything. (Never mind that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has famously concluded, “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.”) Modern Stoicism can feel a little too Red Pill for my comfort.
This wasn’t always the case. Seneca, one of the fathers of Stoicism, advocated that all people (including women and the enslaved) all shared a common humanity, and as such, ought to be treated humanely. Stoicism is a complex and multifaceted philosophy, but at heart it’s about accepting life as it is, including suffering. In Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, Scott Samuelson uses chess as a metaphor:
“I remember as a kid first playing chess with my dad. When I sound found myself with only a knight and king, I ardently wished that I could make my knight move like a queen, zap all my father’s many remaining pieces, and corner him into checkmate. If my father had been the indulgent sort (he wasn’t), he would have let me do just that. I would have ‘won,’ but my victory would have meant the destruction of the very game that I wanted to win at. It turns out, he checkmated me in a few deft moves. The game was not at fault.”
Sounds simple enough, in theory. But what does it look like when the rubber hits the road? For the answer to that, I turned to my favorite Stoic, my husband, Ryan. I recently interviewed him at our kitchen table while our kids interjected snarky comments.
Ryan’s bent towards Stoicism grew in the years after we married and moved around Europe as he pursued a master’s degree—a period marked by shady landlords, unreliable heating, and bouts of being too broke to afford groceries. Graduating and earning a living wage for the first time made him question what he really needed to survive. Time, it seemed, was his most precious resource, so if he had to trade time to an employer for money, frivolous spending was burning up precious minutes of his life. He started reading personal finance blogs, including those of the Financial Independance, Retire Early (FIRE) Movement and came upon Mr. Money Mustache.
“[Money Mustache’s] point was that the best things in life are free—family and friends, basically,” Ryan explained. “So don't spend all of your money on material things and then you will find that if you work hard and you manage to get yourself a decent salary, that you will have excess and eventually you won't need your job anymore. And at that point, you should still be productive (it's good to be a productive person in society,) but just find something that you enjoy and if people wanna pay you money for it, great. But if they don't, well, you're in luck because you don't need it.”
Further reading about The Hedonic Treadmill (the idea that you get used to luxuries quickly and then start craving new luxuries) led to posts about Stoicism—finally, a name for these ideas he had been carrying around about what it meant to live a “good life.”
I’ll be honest, Ryan and I don’t always see eye to eye on this. Early in our marriage we squabbled over lunches out and new clothes. But fifteen years in, we’ve reached a decent compromise on needs vs. wants, and are privileged enough to have financial wiggle room for occasional frivolous spending. I still sometimes get annoyed—Ryan makes unflappability look easy. At moments like this, I blame nature or nurture for making him mellow and me uptight and, yes, emotional.
So when I asked him about this stoic idea of mastering one’s emotions, I was surprised by his answer:
“To me, it's not about trying to remove the emotions. I want to see and acknowledge them, and then think through my actions.”
“It's not acting out of anger, fear, or sadness, but thinking, ‘well, I am having these emotions,’ and, ‘what can I concretely do, that's going to actually benefit me and others?’ and ‘What signal are these emotions giving me, that can be of use?’”
I realized he was talking not about acting robotically, discounting his emotions, but about resisting impulsive reactions. Which is something I generally agree with?! Oh no, am I becoming a Stoic?
The hardest part of Stoicism, Ryan allowed, was differentiating between suffering that could/should be fixed and figuring out what we’re actually powerless over. That is a theme we’ve seen across Suffering Month—what suffering to fight and what to simply accept. Or as his favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, “So it goes.” This bare epitaph punctuates the recording of each death, reminding us that loss and death are just a part of life.
Journal/Discussion Questions:
Is Stoicism appealing to you? Why/why not?
What role do emotions play in your decision making?
What is the dumbest part of the whole Effective Altruism/SBF debacle?