Stoicism’s Popular Return: Tech Bro Optimization, Therapeutic Philosophy, and Religious Decline

PART II: Happiness, Coping, and Peter Thiel?

Are You Happy? Yes, But I am Stoic About It!

I agree with Tillich, much of what people find interesting about Stoicism is the courage that it can grant you. In the 21^st century, so much of what draws people to read Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and others, and more what compels them to create newsletters around their content is their practical strategies for coping with life’s ubiquitous struggles. Seneca famously wrote concerning the universal reality of life’s shortness:

I have no time for such nonsense; a mighty undertaking is on my hands. What am I to do? Death is on my trail, and life is fleeting away; teach me something with which to face these troubles. Bring it to pass that I shall cease trying to escape from death, and that life may cease to escape from me. Give me the courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable. Relax the straitened limits of the time which is allotted me. Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little....You are mistaken if you think that only on an ocean voyage there is a very slight space between life and death. No, the distance between is just as narrow everywhere. It is not everywhere that death shows himself so near at hand; yet everywhere he is near at hand.

Seneca’s words are illustrative of how the Stoics look honestly at life’s fragility and uncertainty so that one may live life more wisely or virtuously. A Stoic tradition shared by other traditions such as Christianity is memento mori—remembering death as an exercise. It was a tradition born in ancient Greece but spread throughout history and over Europe. “On the face of it,” writes L.S. Dugdale, “the idea of memento mori might strike us as morbid. But in medieval Europe it was considered a vital tool for orienting life’s priorities. Life was lived with a view toward death.” Stoic philosopher Epictetus instructs this contemplation in his Enchiridion, “Let death and exile, and all other terrible things appear before your eyes daily, but most importantly death; and you will never again entertain a hopeless thought, or too early desire anything.” The idea is not unlike something one might learn in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy through exposing a patient to something so fearful that over time and exposure the fear subsides and aids the patient in developing a mastery of old fears. Or to be terribly practical about it, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his meditations, “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.” One must certainly appreciate the clarity in this practical bit of motivational wisdom—philosopher and tech entrepreneurs alike.

Human existence is not only difficult because we are finite and will all suffer and die. It is also challenging because of the psychological suffering we experience. We suffer from our heightened attachment to the opinions of others, are people pleasing, and experience other forms of social stress. So, in a world where someone could suffer injury from public opinion, Epictetus’ words are useful: “If a person had handed over your body to a stranger, you would certainly be angry. So why do you not feel any shame in handing over your own mind to any criticiser, to be unsettled and annoyed.”¹⁶¹

Marcus Aurelius too chides himself in a philosophical way that reminds one of a parent teaching their child on the playground, “honey, you just worry about yourself, don’t worry about what others do!” Aurelius says, “Do not waste the remainder of thy life in thoughts about others, when thou dost not refer thy thoughts to some object of common utility. For thou losest the opportunity of doing something else when thou hast such thoughts as these. What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away form the observation of our own ruling power.”¹⁶² Aurelius‘ Stoic outlook is very practical about human nature. His advice becomes simple to say, harder to accomplish, but the reason for it is very practical. You have better things to commit your time and energy to; he constantly reminds himself in Meditations.

My favorite portion of Meditations comes at the beginning of section II. I can imagine this as a daily meditation for leaders of all types, rehearsed like a mantra or morning prayer. I can even see it hanging up on walls as a framed poster, next to another framed poster of Rudyard Kipling’s If, “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil,” says Aurelius. Yes, he is saying, you will meet jerks today, people will no doubt irritate you. He continues,

But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and turn away.

These examples show how Stoicism is uniquely poised to help those who suffer greatly navigate the suffering. I dare say, in our world of great excess, the kinds of things that money and success have yet to be able to “fix” have to do with our mortality, and the fact that we will find things to worry about socially—indeed, people are wonderful and challenging. Stoicism is practical and helpful, and I must say when I read it I find much in common with other strains of thought, like the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but also with Buddhist philosophy, and aspects of Christian thought.

In the introduction to Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age, he sees similarities between Buddhism, Christianity, and Stoicism in that they all have ways of dealing with the suffering of life that is connected to renunciation. “In both Buddhism and Christianity,” he writes, “there is something similar in spite of the great difference in doctrine. This is that the believer or devout person is called on to make a profound inner break with the goals of flourishing, to the point of the extinction of self in one case, or to the renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God in the other. The respective patterns are clearly visible in the exemplary figures. The Buddha achieves Enlightenment; Christ to a degrading death to follow his father’s will.” Stoicism too involves a great deal of renunciation, or a realignment of life’s expectations such that one is detached from the expectation to flourish, because, “in the Christian case, the very point of renunciation requires that the ordinary flourishing forgone be confirmed as valid.” Christianity does not deny the goal of flourishing, for its ultimate goal consists of restoration of a just cosmos beyond the travails of this age. Stoicism has no view of such hope.

There are overlapping concepts that can mislead readers into thinking Stoicism is fully compatible with religions such as Christianity. For instance, both traditions use terms like God and Logos. Yet as C. Kavin Rowe demonstrates in his insightful One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, these words are not used in translatable ways. Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity may share some surface content, but when it comes to metaphysical substance they differ sharply and must be contrasted. Rowe’s subtitle proves instructive: Stoicism and Christianity are best understood as “rival traditions.” His central insight is that each offers not just ideas but a distinct way of life, rooted in its own practices, narratives, and moral grammar. For the Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), philosophy is a therapeutic discipline—shaping existence through inner fortitude, alignment with Nature, and mastery of the passions. In contrast, early Christians formed identity through story and community: St. Paul by building the church, St. Luke by narrating the continuation of Jesus’s redemptive work, and Justin Martyr by presenting Christ as the incarnate Logos, true wisdom by which life is ordered. Crucially, Stoicism lacks a theological account of sin and redemption—the Fall—while Christianity never fully reckons with Fortuna (chance, fate). Their aspirations may overlap, but the stories they tell and the lives they form diverge at the deepest levels.

But it is the overlaps between Stoicism and Christianity (and to a lesser extent Buddhism and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) that interests me the most in this 21^st century moment. Partly this is due to Tillich’s notion that for the West, in religions decline all we are left with for religious sensibility is Stoicism and partly because of the popularity of its usefulness in today’s society, when what is found so useful are the elements one might find in traditional Christianity, Judaism, and other views of life. Besides the decline in traditional religion, what is missing in contemporary society that makes Stoicism so appealing?

Coping at the End of the Road

Perhaps, nothing is really missing at all. Perhaps, it is that at this point in history, when we have gotten everything we could ever need materially, and when we have pursued libertarian freedoms to their end, and when we have been able to assert ourselves authentically that we have finally discovered that we still suffer truths of our finitude. Each one of us will experience pain, death, and each one of us will no doubt worry about our place in this world. To prove my point, all you must do is read the fascinating interview between NY Times columnist Ross Douthat and tech venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Thiel’s whole point was that we have been in technological stagnation and society must put an end to it, or we will suffer:

Douthat: To keep us in the concrete, I want to stay with that example for a minute and ask: OK, what does it mean to say we need to take more risks in anti-aging research? Does it mean that the F.D.A. has to step back and say: Anyone who has a new treatment for Alzheimer’s can go ahead and sell it on the open market? What does risk in the medical space look like?

Thiel: Yeah, you would take a lot more risk. If you have some fatal disease, there probably are a lot more risks you can take. There are a lot more risks the researchers can take.

Culturally, what I imagine it looks like is early modernity, where people thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would have radical life extension. Immortality was part of the project of early modernity. It was Francis Bacon, Condorcet. Maybe it was anti-Christian, maybe it was downstream of Christianity. It was competitive. If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.

I remember 1999 or 2000, when we were running PayPal, one of my co-founders, Luke Nosek — he was into Alcor and cryonics and that people should freeze themselves. And we had one day where we took the whole company to a freezing party. You know a Tupperware party? People sell Tupperware policies. At a freezing party, they sell ——

Douthat: Was it just your heads? What was going to be frozen?

Thiel: You could get a full body or just a head.

Douthat: The “just the head” option was cheaper.

Thiel: It was disturbing when the dot matrix printer didn’t quite work, and so the freezing policies couldn’t be printed out.

Douthat: Technological stagnation once again, right?

Thiel: But in retrospect, it’s also a symptom of the decline, because in 1999 this was not a mainstream view, but there was still a fringe boomer view where they still believed they could live forever. And that was the last generation. So I’m always anti-boomer, but maybe there’s something we’ve lost even in this fringe boomer narcissism, where there were at least a few boomers who still believed science would cure all their diseases. No one who’s a millennial believes that anymore.

This is an astounding section of an astounding interview, and it reminds me of the recent satire film Mountainhead about a group of billionaires on a retreat trying to outdo, outlive, and outshine one another’s prestige in every aspect of life: love, material wealth, power, and even be the first to enter into a transhumanistic consciousness. Douthat and Thiel’s real-life conversation goes on to discuss theology, transhumanism, the antichrist, and private conversations about how Elon Musk is afraid that woke ideology will follow him to Mars. But what floors me when I read it, is that it represents yet another cultural artefact: denying finitude. Our culture is in denial. Our technocentric hopes and dreams diagnose that we as a culture are still “kicking against the goads” of what philosophy reveals about human existence. Stoicism’s appeal in this late time in history might be the sobering alarm and early waking up of many who realize that no matter how much we advance as a society, we must still contend with the fundamental nature of our lives as a species in this universe, again, suffering is part of what it means to live.

Finitude is not for wimps. If ever we are able to amass more wealth than ever before managed, we might find ourselves still wishing to escape our planet for another one where the presence of an ideology we do not like is left far behind. Or as in Mountainhead we might have more than we could ever want, yet when we compare ourselves to others, we find that it is still not enough. The most existentially impactful storyline in that film has to do with the senior most billionaire, the mentor of the group, if you will. He has an incurable cancer. The entire drama of the film is set off by his calculating desire to turn the tide of companies, governments, and culture just so he can extend his consciousness in a post-human state. No matter our Net worth, we will all die—this is the truth of biological life.

I promise, I do not mean to pile on. As I said, finitude is not for wimps. But speaking in the language of toughness, who can forget the spat between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? These two men are amongst the wealthiest our planet has ever seen. They are successful by so many metrics. Both, presumably, have great health care, and many friends (at least on Facebook and X). Yet, they suffered at the hands of social scrutiny, by one another. Yes, they started a public spat. This, of course, led to them challenging one another to a cage match fight. Social shame, the pain of our standing and issues of respect can be so pronounced that it can even lead intelligent, and well-educated men to an embarrassing display of toughness. Then, of course, they suffer from the humiliation of that display which is more embarrassing than the original sleight. No one thought it was tough, so then they have to deal with the mockery associated with the whole affair. In the end, at this late stage of our advanced society, it seems that its many discontents have to do with existential pains that simply concur with being a finite, biological, and social creatures.

I do not need to focus on the plight of others when it comes to suffering in the modern life, and how Stoicism might proves helpful. Several years ago, I found myself in my own unexpected state of suffering. Rather abruptly, I discovered that I was in late-stage liver failure and I was dying. Through medical intervention and time, my body was stabilized, but I still needed a liver transplant. I was in a sort of liminal space. I was healthy enough to take walks, visit the doctor, and read books. But I was too sick to be at work—I had a lot of time on my hands to contemplate my ever-closeness to death; without a new liver my day to day existence was very unreliable. Over the course of that year I read many books, all in an attempt to help me cope with my fragile existence. I read theology and philosophy. Sincerely, I found help in Stoicism and Buddhism. I even listened to The Subtle Art by Mark Manson as I took my midday walks trying to rebuild my strength and stamina. If I was not painfully aware of my condition, all these texts made me confront my death and imagine the fragility and shortness of life.

I recall, after living this experience for some time, speaking to a therapist about my present condition. “I feel like I have a superpower,” I told him. “What do you mean,” he asked. I went on to explain that all the things that typically led me to fits of anxiety had gone away. “I do not care anymore,” I told him. Indeed, all the stuff that aroused anxiety, worry, mind-wandering, and “the monkey mind” had faded away. I no longer gave inappropriate levels of care to those items. I held them much more loosely. No, it was not the simple reading of Stoic thought or other traditions that practice memento mori. Rather, it was because I was forced into memento mori with every moment of my uncertain life. Even though I hoped to live and worked for my health, I felt a freedom to care about things that matter more than at any other point in my life.

A few months went by, and my health began to improve. I was healthy enough to go back to work, though still destined for a liver transplant. During that time I was under the care of a Spiritual Director trained the Jesuit tradition. He asked me, “how have you been experiencing God in this time?” After 2-3 minutes of silent reflection, I spoke. “I have felt God all the way through this season. But over the past few months, I do not think I have felt God in a personal way.” I told him I still believed that the divine was present, ever near. But I did not necessarily have any deeper feeling or sense of the presence. Frankly, I wondered if that would be the “wrong response.” I was unsure of how he would take this news. After a few moments of listening and processing, he spoke. “You need to learn the lesson of detachment.” “Detachment,” I repeated curiously. I mean, Christianity teaches about detaching from stuff of this world, Buddhism teaches detachment from desire, but how is detaching from God a healthy thing. John, my director, said “yes, you need to detach from your need to feel God to know God is there, to follow God, to be secure in God’s love.” He suggested that our feelings come and go, that the sense of God is revealed and hidden in this world, so “it is natural that you will sometimes feel God and it is natural that sometimes you won’t.” He taught me that by learning to detach from the need to feel God, and to accept this reality I would be even more free.

Time marched on, mercifully. Eventually, I underwent the lifesaving transplant surgery—my life was spared after another person’s life was cut short, abruptly. I recovered from surgery, went back to work, and over time I allowed all the day-to-day concerns to fill my imagination. The superpower I once had when I was closer to death was starting to fade. I began to care too much about things that had been re-evaluated when I was closer to death. I sensed this was a problem, and I wished to get back to the clarity I had when I was so sick, months before. And I devoted much time to exploring this in my personal therapy as well as my spiritual direction sessions. That is when I double backed to a lesson I knew from before (found in Stoicism and Christianity), but realized that I needed to surround with practices and disciplines so its truths would penetrate my mind, heart, and being: memento mori. I must remind myself often that I am going to die, to realign my mental priorities. And I have some practices that are particular to me.

Over time, I learned that I have three natural reflections based upon my illness that take me right to the edge of life reflection. In my post–liver transplant life, I often turn my body itself into a site of memento mori. The scar that runs across my abdomen is a daily reminder that I have walked close to death. The jar that holds my old liver sits as a strange relic—an artifact of both my frailty and the medical grace that carried me through. And every morning when I line up my pills, I am reminded that my life is contingent, dependent, and borrowed. These embodied practices are not morbid rehearsals but contemplations that orient me toward gratitude and humility: each scar, relic, and pill is a teacher whispering, “Your time is finite—live awake, live wisely, live well.”

CHECK IN TOMORROW FOR PART III On What We Can Learn Form The Stoics as We try to Speak the Sacred today