There’s a palpable excitement among modern Stoics that’s only partly about the Stoic teachings themselves, as useful and potentially life changing as they are. The excitement, it seems, is also about the “meta-lesson” of Stoicism: not any particular teaching, but the example provided by the ancient school itself of an approach — a kind of spiritual or wisdom tradition that many of us hadn’t considered before, and that the modern world desperately needs.
It’s an approach that seeks to distill guidance on how best to live by first striving to be cleareyed and undeceived about life-as-we-find-it. It looks unflinchingly at the world in which we find ourselves, and the nature of our own lived experience within it. It cultivates and sharpens our tools for thinking well, for sifting truth from appearances. It passes down the best nuggets of hard-won wisdom, the clearest insights and guidance on how our minds can stumble or thrive. It invites reflection on cosmic unity and ethics and our place in the world.
Yet it eschews dogma, treating the enterprise as a work in progress, a shared ongoing inquiry. It’s doggedly practical and empirical, seeking truth and understanding about the world and, from that, how best to live in it — not pious fictions to swear allegiance to.
Seneca might have said it best:
Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road—but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. Much is left also for those yet to come. (Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius, 33.11, translation: Graver, Long)
Whether or not we adopt any particular Stoic teaching or practice, this model of an evolving wisdom tradition is deeply inspiring. While there are other traditions and movements with important similarities, such as Buddhism and secular humanism, our culture doesn’t have a widely established tradition quite like this one. Underlying the excitement in the Modern Stoicism movement, I think, is the collective realization that we owe it to ourselves — and to our descendants — to reanimate one.
The approach
So what are the key traits of the Stoics’ approach?
1. Keep a singular focus on living well, not just thinking about living well. Tangents of intellectual curiosity or impersonal trivia are a distraction belonging to some other enterprise. Conceptual knowledge may be useful but is not the point: it must be realized in our lived experience, moment to moment. Its goal is not to teach us, but to change us.
2. Take life as we find it, not as we wish or imagine it to be. To know how best to live in this world, seek first to know as truly as possible the nature of our lived experience and the nature of the world in which we find ourselves. Strive not to be deceived — especially by ourselves. Prefer not knowing over comforting fictions.
3. Identify the core elements of human flourishing, and the most common sources of folly. Hone the most concise teachings and practices to cultivate the former and avoid the latter. There’s always more advice that can help in various situations, but focus on the absolute central nuggets inherent to being human. Devote the time necessary to apply these practices and make progress toward living less foolishly, more wisely, more beautifully.
4. Pass all this down as a shared, ongoing inquiry and endeavor. Whatever is true about human nature and the larger world is true for each of us, here and now. Nobody has a special monopoly on it. Acknowledge that life is always bigger than our current ideas about it. To hew as closely as possible to “life as we find it,” this shared endeavor must naturally evolve over time as new truths and understandings are discovered.
This, or something like this, is the meta-lesson of Stoicism: the underlying approach. The practical Stoic teachings and insights that we’re all familiar with derive from a community of people persistently applying an approach like this for generations.
We may update some of the archaic particulars of those teachings for the modern age, reject others, and maybe propose new ones. But as we do so, we act within this overall framework — this approach to a wisdom tradition — that they started. I find a thrilling comfort in knowing that the ancient Stoics themselves would have enthusiastically encouraged us to do so.
As we take up the lost thread of this great wisdom tradition and seek out routes that are more direct — the truths “left also for those yet to come” — we can keep this underlying approach as a North Star that keeps the tradition on course.
What it’s not
This excitement among modern Stoics comes not only from what this approach prescribes but what it avoids.
For example, the first key trait — the singular focus on living well — distinguishes it from academic philosophy or science. Those are valuable traditions, but they are intellectual ones, devoted to the accumulation and refinement of objective knowledge. Science is not in the business of training the populace to thrive, nor should it be. It best serves society by sticking to its mandate. Academic philosophy has wandered deep into the maze of intellectual abstraction, and doesn’t seem to be much in the actually living better business anymore.
Stoicism is a refreshing reminder that wisdom must be embodied in your waking life to be genuine. It’s about the quality of people’s lived experience; not just what you know, but how you experience the world and conduct yourself within it. The scientist or philosopher who has deep knowledge of the world, yet behaves as a petty person, has somehow lost the plot.
The second key trait — the commitment to face life-as-it-is and avoid self-deception — is the discipline required to steer clear of the pitfalls of New Age nonsense. So much of modern spirituality is based on the blithe credulousness of people for nice-sounding ideas. The short-term comforts gained by believing in crystal healing, or whatever else, aren’t worth having your cherished worldview undergirded by wobbly fictions.
That said, should crystal healing someday prove to actually work in clinical experiments, a true Stoic would accept it and seek to update their view of the world accordingly. That’s what it means for a tradition to evolve.
The third key trait — identifying and rehearsing the most central insights and practices — is an antidote to the novelty-seeking that plagues the wilderness of the self-help industry. In the competition for eyeballs and dollars, the book or article or video that promises unexpected new keys to wellbeing will prevail over the one that just reminds you to practice the things you already “know”.
One of the great values of a tradition is that it reminds you to revisit the basics — the foundation — because perhaps you don’t fully know “in your bones” what you know intellectually. Humans don’t simply hear a lesson once and internalize it forever. If only it were so simple. To fully grok and internalize and be changed by some central insight, we have to pound it into our skulls repeatedly for years. That’s why having a practice is necessary.
The fourth key trait — passing it down as a tradition of shared inquiry — is a safeguard against all manner of religious and hierarchical dysfunction. The simple acknowledgment that we’re ultimately talking about the lived human experience that we’re all equally a part of is deeply honest and equalizing. There’s no inscrutable divine revelation here. There’s no need to grovel before the guru.
The Stoic path was not one of merely believing, or even merely knowing. It was a path of scrutinizing and understanding and becoming, of applying and revising and embodying. It was a collective project of discovering and living according to our best nature, beginning in public on a painted porch in Athens and continuing for half a millennium.
The millennium to come
Beyond all of this, I think the excitement also comes from seeing how perfectly the Stoic approach fits our modern times … and the inevitably noisier times ahead.
Rather than being at odds with scientific knowledge, it embraces and builds on it, showing the deep connectedness, self-knowledge, and orientation it implies when reflected on experientially — existentially — and not just intellectually.
Rather than peddling every flimsy pseudo-spiritual belief that people want to be true, it counsels skill in sifting truth from impressions and vigilance against false beliefs.
Rather than accepting that an academic education is enough to equip a person for a lifetime of living, it asserts that there is more to do — that over the centuries, humanity can actually learn a thing or two about how to live more gracefully and beautifully. And that this knowledge, this practical wisdom, is propagated not when people learn it, but when they embody it.
The coming century is going to be a challenging time for humanity, for reasons that are all too familiar. If we’re all paralyzed with anxiety and distraction and myopic tribal animosities, the task of transitioning to a sustainable, thriving global human civilization will be vastly harder, and might fail. We must do better. We must be better. And the Stoics showed us an exciting approach for doing so.
Patrick Barry is a board member of The Stoic Fellowship and runs a stoa in Pittsburgh. He was a science journalist for 10 years before becoming a software engineer, and most recently worked for the Waking Up meditation app. He has made a concerted study and practice of Stoicism and mindfulness for the last 6 years.
I really appreciate this article’s emphasis on Stoicism as practical, embracing the scientific & political realities of our world, rather than New Age nonsense. This author really knows what he’s talking about and his insights have been a true gift to me today. I needed to read this!