What’s Wrong with Stoicism Today?

There have been many revivals of Stoicism in the West since the Renaissance. The latest of these is happening online, be it on Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or TikTok, where we’ve seen an influx of muscly Marcus Aurelius content. Or is it just my algorithm?  

A new group of writers have seized upon this internet trend, producing books to accompany the feed. With titles ranging from the alarming How to Think Like a Roman Emperor to the somewhat racy Discipline is Destiny, they have transformed Stoicism into a lifehack under the guise of ancient wisdom for modern life.   

I had no idea about this trend until 2022, when a friend of mine handed me a copy of the Daily Stoic. Flipping through it, I was flabbergasted. The book appeared to make Stoic Philosophy digestible, and derived from it a set of ‘actionable’ techniques for managing adversity, and even promised at one point “the recipe for happiness and joy.”  

After doing a little more investigation into the Pop-Stoic phenomenon, I discovered two things. First, these writers have amassed fame and fortune, and second, they have sparked an almost cult-like interest in the works of Roman Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, and Epictetus’ Discourses occupy first, seventh, and tenth place respectively on Amazon.nl’s bestseller list, with another translation of the Meditations occupying fourth place at the time of writing.  

The Online Stoic Loop 

Thanks to the work of these marketeers, it should be acknowledged, Ancient Philosophy has grown as a popular topic in public discourse. One might even consider it a good thing that people are increasingly complaining about the superficiality of Pop-Stoicism.  

However, this complaint is usually voiced in a cacophony of pundits flexing their Stoic muscles in underinformed or even downright hostile online echo chambers. A brief glance at Reddit shows this Pop-Stoic symphony on its nth repetition. The subreddit by the name of r/Stoicism, a community of 767,000 members as of November 2025, is buzzing with debate. 

A typical post in this community is someone asking where to start with their reading of Stoicism. In a recent post, Human_Asparagus_7497 told the community that recently they’d “come to enjoy stoic ideologies” and asked for book recommendations to “better understand the history and the real meaning” of Stoicism – fair questions that a BA Philosophy student might ask. Predictably, others in the thread responded by recommending the abovementioned bestselling Roman Stoics and Pop-Stoic works. 

The Challenges of Understanding Ancient Stoicism  

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the online Stoic loop will quench Mr. Asparagus’ thirst for understanding. A classic question asked by scholars interpreting Marcus Aurelius is the extent to which his Meditations can properly be called a work of philosophy.  

As for the other two bestsellers, the works attributed to Epictetus are notoriously dense and cryptic, not to mention that it is generally agreed that they were not written by Epictetus himself but by a student who attended his lectures, further complicating the work’s accessibility. 

And while Seneca’s letters are written in a memorable and accessible style, they assume a familiarity with Stoic concepts that had, by Seneca’s time, already been philosophical currency for over three hundred years in Hellenic Greek Stoicism – precisely the familiarity that our herbaceous Redditor is looking to acquire.  

This points to a more complex problem in interpreting Stoicism, virtually unacknowledged in Pop-Stoic works, which is that these Roman Stoic bestsellers frequently employ philosophical concepts developed by the Greek Stoics before them. These concepts, such as God, body, soul, impression, and breath, denote something almost completely foreign to what these words convey today.  

Diagnosing Pop-Stoicism 

What I came to find is that many of these Pop-Stoic works mislead people into adopting Stoicism without also encouraging people to engage with it philosophically. One such book, The Obstacle is the Way, even explicitly rejects academic work on Stoicism as needlessly complicated.  

Pop-Stoic authors often don’t have a background in philosophy, and as a result they tend to misconstrue Stoicism and the ancient philosophical debates in which it arose. Their works present us with a neatly packaged panacea for modern ills. In attempting to make Stoicism digestible, they leave us thirsty for proper explanations. 

Thankfully, for those who are curious about Stoicism, there is an alternative.  

A Revival of Stoicism Worth Choosing  

It is thanks to the revival of scholarly interest in Stoicism in the twentieth century that today we are arguably in a better place to piece together the philosophy of the Stoics than we’ve ever been. 

For example, at the start of the twentieth century, the German classical scholar Hans von Arnim collected in four volumes the fragmentary references to the Greek Stoics, providing a starting point from which scholars are still building up a picture of what ancient Stoicism actually consists in. 

One of Erasmus University’s very own Assistant Professors, Dr. Ada Bronowski, is among these scholars and has undertaken important research on Stoic logic. As for me, I am a PhD student at ESPhil doing research on the revival of Stoicism in the Early Modern Period. 

Some Questions to Consider

The issues raised by contemporary Pop-Stoicism prompt several important questions: 

Who benefits from Pop-Stoicism? What does its rapid rise reveal about contemporary culture? And should we really want people to think like Roman emperors?