Day 14 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Stoicism has a reputation for coldness.
The word “stoic” in everyday English means something like unfeeling, unmoved, indifferent to pain.
The Stoics did say things that sound cold, and the teaching on relationships is where that tension is most acute.
“Never say of anything, ‘I have lost it’; but, ‘I have returned it.’ Is your child dead? It has been returned.”
~ Epictetus
That’s a hard sentence.
It’s supposed to be.
Epictetus is giving you a frame that makes grief survivable: the recognition that everyone and everything you love was never yours to keep permanently.
You were a steward.
The loan has been called in.
The grief is real.
The possession was always temporary.
The reframe doesn’t diminish the love.
It changes its structure.
A relationship built on ownership, I have this person, this friendship, this life, becomes a relationship built on presence.
I have this person now, fully and gratefully, knowing that now was always all I was guaranteed.
Marcus Aurelius lost children.
He lost friends.
He lost colleagues and advisers he respected.
He wrote about these losses with genuine grief, not the performed equanimity of someone who had shut down their emotional capacity.
Stoicism gave him a framework that let him feel fully without being destroyed by the feeling.
The Stoic teaching on relationships has three layers.
The first is impermanence, what Epictetus said about returning rather than losing.
Hold the people you love with an open hand.
They matter too much for you to relate to them primarily through the anxiety of potential loss.
The second is about expectation.
Much of what passes for relational difficulty is the collision between what you want someone to be and what they are.
Other people’s behaviour lives outside your control.
You cannot make someone love you, agree with you, change for you, or see what you see.
What you can choose is how you respond to what they actually do, and what you extend toward them regardless.
This is where the Stoic teaching on relationships connects most directly to vegan life.
The vegan experience of relationships often carries a particular kind of grief: watching people you love make choices you believe cause harm, and being unable to change it.
Partners who don’t share your values.
Family members who think veganism is a phase.
Friends who are sympathetic in theory and unchanged in practice.
The urge to fix this, to persuade, to convert, to somehow close the gap between what you know and what they’re willing to act on, is understandable.
It’s also, in most cases, futile.
The Stoic position recognises that your relationships can’t be primarily structured around what you need the other person to become.
They are who they are.
You love them or you don’t.
Making love conditional on agreement tends to damage both the relationship and the cause you’re trying to advance.
This doesn’t mean staying silent about what you believe.
It means choosing when and how you speak about it, from a position of relationship rather than moral leverage.
Someone who feels loved unconditionally is far more likely to be curious about your choices than someone who feels constantly evaluated against a standard they didn’t sign up for.
The third layer concerns the wider community, what the Stoics called oikeiôsis, usually translated as “affiliation” or “appropriation.”
They believed human beings are naturally oriented toward connection, and that the good life involves extending care outward in concentric circles: yourself, your family, your community, humanity at large.
Mutual obligation and shared responsibility sat at the centre of the idea.
For vegans, this framework extends naturally beyond the human circle.
If the Stoic argument is that we have obligations to other beings in proportion to our capacity to recognise them as centres of experience, as beings with something to lose, then where the circles stop is genuinely open.
The Stoics didn’t go there.
That’s a real limitation, and the work of applying their framework consistently is part of what makes vegan Stoicism a coherent position rather than two unrelated things.
Practice for today
Think of a relationship in your life where you feel frustrated, where the other person isn’t behaving the way you want or need them to.
Ask:
Am I relating to this person primarily through what I need them to become?
What would the relationship look like if you loved them as they are, while remaining clear about your own values?
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.