Why Stoicism is Popular

Hint: It's About Masculinity

A few months ago, I read a post that tried to figure out why Stoicism became so popular. Here’s my hypothesis, as someone who “consumed” stoicism before it became the social media sensation it is today.¹

Stoicism is popular because it sells a myth or ethos of invulnerability to a population who really wants to feel invulnerable: young men.

Over the course of this post, I’m going to be referring to this brand of Stoicism as “Pop Stoicism”

The Cultural Backdrop: Perceived Scarcity and Lack of Control

One important dynamic of the last 30 or 40 years is that things in America are more expensive. This is true of housing, education, child care, and other important goods. What’s more, dating is much harder for everyone because people aren’t socializing offline anymore; it’s harder to meet new people.

Further, incomes in America have steadily gone up over the last few decades, but many of them have been concentrated at the middle and high ends of the income bracket. More importantly, two of the most important factors of determining income are education and experience. Young men are “losing out” in the economy only because young people are always losing out in the economy because they haven’t developed experience yet.

What’s more, many high paying jobs are concentrated in big cities, which a significant portion of workers do not have access to. This is the challenge of the economy in America: we’re constantly growing economically, but inaccessible geography and insufficient skills training are natural barriers for that growth being shared by everyone.²

Enter Pop Stoicism

So if you’re a young man, you’re more likely to be single and have a hard time finding dates than your parents or grandparents did, you have to save longer to afford a home, and you have to go into what feels like crippling debt to afford higher education.

There’s a massive amount of uncertainty for your future. The only thing certain, indeed, is that the next few years of your life are going to be chaotic, and you’ll either have to delay gratification at an uncomfortable proportion, or indulge and never get ahead.

Pop Stoicism sells this idea that you, young man, can endure this chaos. You can find a balance between instant and delayed gratification, and come out the other side of this uncertain time of your life as essentially the same person, but superior.

This motivational ethos is not unique or original to Pop Stoicism, but Pop Stoicism was uniquely positioned, relative to other philosophies, to supply the cultural demand for motivation and reassurance. Stoic literature was always popular with successful business people, and authors like Ryan Holliday popularized them further in the last decade.

But Pop Stoicism did more than supply young men with a pep talk and reassurances that they could persevere through hard time. Much of Pop Stoicism’s practical advice is generally good: rudimentary cognitive behavioral therapy, understanding the dichotomy of control, that life itself is a struggle, that virtue is important, that in many ways you are the person you practice being, and much more.

In this way, Pop Stoicism isn’t like the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelias, but it’s also not empty self-help either. There is a philosophy worth venerating here, even if its followers turn astray.

Statues, Incorrigibility, And Male Vulnerability

If you peruse Stoicism online or in a bookstore, you’ll find the “vibe” of Stoicism fits an immutable, unchangeable ethos. If you’re like me, and try to visualize the Stoics, you don’t actually visualize thinkers like Marcus Aurelias as a person, but as a statue.³

I know that sounds weird, but if you search for Stoicism on YouTube, you’re more likely to see a statue in the thumbnail than, say, a painting of a Stoic. The fact that this is what the algorithm rewards tells us something about the people consuming this content. Namely, they want to be as strong and incorrigible as a statue.⁴

Years ago, I read a few books by Peter Edelman on poverty in America and at one point he pointed out that vulnerable women lean on their sexuality to protect themselves, while vulnerable men turn to violence. So, when you look at poor areas, it’s not surprising when you see elevated rates of single motherhood among young women and violent crime among young men.⁵

If we look at the people who are heavily into Pop Stoicism ( as vulnerable, perhaps insecure men,⁶ it makes sense that they subconsciously find role models in literal statues of strength.

How Stoicism Fell Short For Me

Having said all of that, I think most people who earnestly try to live as a Stoic, find that many of their ideas unsatisfactory.

There are many great articles on Everyday Epicurean criticizing traditional Stoic teachings (more links), so I’ll just focus on a few things that I found questionable about Stoicism in my experience.

I found Stoicism in 2018 during a 10 month stretch of unemployment between graduate school and my first adult job. It was rough time in my life. The ideas of growing through adversity, feeling an extent of control over my life, and maintaining my own sense of identity was appealing to me.

First, what seemed absolutely absurd to me was the idea that we could desensitize ourselves to extreme hardship by “practicing it.” More specifically, I don’t think I could “visualize” my mother dying every day and it eventually lead to me not being sad when it eventually happens. In fact, exercises like this are a tremendous waste of time. When my mother eventually dies, it’s going to be sad no matter what I do, and it seems silly to ruin the time I have now by thinking about it every day.⁷

In this respect, I saw a similarity between Buddhism and Stoicism, who both seemed to push this idea that someone could endure immense pain (think of monks self-immolating or some Roman guy enduring torture and family members dying) just by practicing it every day. That seems like a great proposition, but when you think about it, could it also be the case that the people who endured that pain just have top-percentile pain tolerance? Maybe it’s possible for some people to prepare for hardship, but who’s to say I’m one of those people?

When the pandemic hit, that’s when I realized I could not be a Stoic. To use an Epicurean term, I needed active pleasure from the company of other people. I needed reassurances from the outside world that everything would be okay. Visualizing how I could lose everyone or could keep my virtue was not helpful to me. I would have been better off brainstorming ways to safely meet those needs than pretending I didn’t have them.

The Future of Pop Stoicism

The good news is that I think many men feel similarly about Stoicism as I do, if only because they’re getting older. Hopefully, the youthful infatuation with Stoicism will grow other’s lives into those that pursues knowledge, philosophy, conscientiousness, and healthy self-reflection.

The bad news for serious Stoic philosophy is that as long as we have a population of vulnerable, insecure, sub-literate men, you’re going to have influencers and platforms cheapen the philosophy and turn it into a mascot of masculine retributive politics, dressing up misogyny, antipathy, and vice as virtues.

I’m optimistic we’ll eventually persevere that as a culture, just as we persevered through Objectivism, reddit atheism, Ron Paul libertarianism, Bernie Sanders Socialism, and whatever the hell Jordan Peterson is. That doesn’t mean we won’t be inconvenienced in the meantime, though.

1. For context: I got into Stoicism around 2017 or 2018, when it was nevertheless popular, but not as popular as today.

2. The good news is that, with time, most people are going to be fine as they work more jobs throughout their life. One’s 20s are always turbulent, and it’s a shame that our culture is not open about that. In this sense, the economy in America is generally better relative to 30 or 40 years ago and relative to the rest of the world, but you don’t generally notice that if you weren’t working back then or have not left the country.

3. And maybe even a buff one!

4. And maybe buff as well.

5. A crass shorthand of this phenomenon is “Vulnerable men fight, vulnerable women…do another F word.”

6. I’m not saying these men are trying to compensate for perceiving lacking in masculinity, just that they feel less secure about their place in life

7. My mother is alive and well as of this writing!