Modern Stoicism
The Stoics Weren't Trying to Feel Less — They Were Trying to Feel Right
The most common thing people get wrong about Stoicism is the thing that's right there in the word: they think it means not feeling anything.
The Idea
Stoicism has a branding problem. The English word 'stoic' — lowercase, dictionary-definition — has come to mean emotionally closed off, stiff-upper-lipped, enduring hardship without complaint. The ancient philosophy it descends from meant something far more interesting. The Stoics weren't after numbness. They were after what they called eupatheia — good emotions, well-founded emotional responses aligned with reality. The goal wasn't to suppress fear and joy but to replace their distorted versions: anxiety based on things outside your control, elation dependent on circumstances that could vanish tomorrow. What they actually proposed was a radical sorting exercise. Every moment, every situation, every worry — you ask: is this up to me, or isn't it? Your reputation: not up to you. Whether you reason clearly and act with integrity: entirely up to you. This distinction — the dichotomy of control — is the engine of the whole system. And once you really internalise it, it doesn't make you cold; it makes you oddly free. The Stoics called the space between stimulus and response the 'ruling faculty' — your hegemonikon. Modern psychology would later rediscover this gap and call it cognitive reappraisal. What's striking is that the Stoics weren't after detachment from life — Epictetus was a former slave, Marcus Aurelius ran an empire during plague and war. These were people neck-deep in the world, trying to stay clear-eyed inside it.
In the World
In the 1960s, a US Navy pilot named James Stockdale was shot down over Vietnam and spent seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton — tortured repeatedly, kept in isolation, denied medical care. He later said the thing that kept him functional through it was Epictetus, specifically the Enchiridion, which he had read at Stanford before his deployment. Stockdale had genuinely absorbed the dichotomy of control. He knew he couldn't determine when he'd be released, or whether he'd be tortured again tomorrow. What he could control was whether he collaborated, whether he maintained his dignity, how he treated the men under his command. He organised resistance among the prisoners, created communication systems, and refused to be used for propaganda — at one point deliberately disfiguring his own face so he couldn't be filmed. After his release, Stockdale was asked how he had psychologically survived when others hadn't. His answer pointed to those who, paradoxically, had been too optimistic — who kept saying 'we'll be out by Christmas,' then Easter, then the next Christmas. When each deadline passed, they broke. Stockdale never pretended the situation wasn't serious. He just refused to hand his inner response over to circumstances he couldn't control. This is what Stoic practice actually looks like in extremis: not a blank face, but a clear one.
Why It Matters
Most of us will never face anything like Stockdale's situation, which is exactly why it's useful to think about. The dichotomy of control becomes most clarifying precisely when you apply it to ordinary life — the job application you didn't get, the relationship you can't force into a shape you want, the news cycle you keep refreshing as though attention were the same as influence. Modern Stoicism, practised through writers like Ryan Holiday or through the original texts, isn't about performing toughness. It's about something more quietly radical: choosing where to place your energy. If you spend thirty seconds before a difficult conversation asking 'what here is actually up to me?' — not as a way of checking out, but as a way of arriving fully present to what you can actually affect — the quality of that conversation tends to change. This isn't a self-help trick. It's a recalibration of attention that the Stoics considered the foundation of a good life. The emotion remains. The grip it has on you loosens.
A Question to Ponder
Is there something you've been treating as being within your control that genuinely isn't — and if you let go of it, what might you actually be able to do instead?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable