Day 25 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
The Stoics didn’t know about smartphones, social media, factory farming, or climate change.
They lived in a world without antibiotics, without democracy in any meaningful modern sense, and with a life expectancy roughly half of ours.
The question of whether a philosophy developed in that world has anything useful to say in this one is worth asking honestly.
The answer is yes, and not just by coincidence or superficial resemblance.
The most direct line between Stoicism and modern practice runs through psychology.
Cognitive behavioural therapy, developed by Aaron Beck in the 1960s, is built on a foundation that Beck himself traced to Epictetus.
The idea that it is not events, it is our interpretations of events, that generate emotional distress.
The CBT core model, event, thought, emotion, behaviour, is a direct translation of the Stoic distinction between things that happen and the judgements we layer on top of them.
Beck read the Stoics.
He said so.
CBT is Stoicism adapted for a therapeutic context, not Stoicism with a clinical veneer.
The family resemblance is structural, not coincidental.
Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, developed in and after the Nazi concentration camps, draws on the same source.
Frankl’s central claim, derived from experiences considerably more extreme than most Stoic thought experiments, is that the last human freedom is the choice of how to respond to any given circumstance.
That is Epictetan to its core.
Frankl didn’t attribute his thinking to the Stoics explicitly.
The parallel is exact.
The philosophy was tested under conditions that make the thought experiments of ancient Rome look mild, and it held.
Ryan Holiday brought Stoicism back into popular culture in the 2010s, and the result was a significant revival of interest, particularly in business, sport, and the military.
The Obstacle Is the Way introduced Stoic ideas to audiences who would never have picked up Marcus Aurelius directly.
The popularity was real and the books were useful.
The inevitable limitation is that popular Stoicism sometimes smooths the edges, the harder demands of the philosophy, the ones that don’t generate motivational quotes, tend to get less attention than the parts that make good slide decks.
For vegans, the Stoic revival is interesting in a specific way.
Most of the modern Stoic revival has been aimed at performance, how to be more resilient, more disciplined, more effective.
The ethical core of Stoicism, the emphasis on justice, on living according to virtue rather than advantage, on extending moral consideration beyond your immediate circle, has received considerably less attention from the popular revival than it deserves.
The Stoics were not a self-improvement movement.
They were an ethical tradition that produced self-improvement as a side effect of taking ethics seriously.
That distinction matters for how you use what you’ve learned in this series.
The Stoic practices, the morning ritual, the evening review, the journaling, the voluntary discomfort, are not techniques for becoming more productive.
They’re techniques for becoming more aligned with your values.
The productivity is incidental.
The alignment is the point.
Modern life offers specific pressures that the Stoics didn’t face and would have recognised immediately.
The attention economy is a mechanism for making everything feel maximally urgent and personally relevant.
Outrage generates engagement; equanimity doesn’t.
The algorithm prefers people who react to people who respond.
The Stoic practice of distinguishing what is yours from what isn’t, and refusing to give your inner state to things outside your circle of control, is, in the current information environment, a genuinely radical act.
The Stoics didn’t know about social media.
They understood exactly what it’s doing to us.
Practice for today
Read the introduction to Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way, available as a sample online.
Then write: where in your current life do you already see Stoic thinking operating, even without the name?
And where is the modern Stoic revival missing something that the original tradition had?
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.