Stoicism for young people: what Instagram doesn't tell you

If you are between 15 and 25, you have very likely seen some Stoic quote on social media: over a sunrise, with epic music, spoken by someone with abs who trains at five in the morning. "What is not up to you should not cost you sleep." "Discipline is freedom."

They are not false phrases. The problem is what gets left out.

Stoicism started on the street

Stoicism was born in Athens more than 2,300 years ago. Its founder, Zeno of Citium, was a merchant who was shipwrecked near the city and lost almost everything. While waiting to rebuild his life, he started listening to the philosophers in the square and ended up founding his own school.

The name doesn't come from Zeno, but from the place where he taught: a painted portico in Athens' main square, the stoa poikile. The Stoics were, literally, "the people of the portico". A philosophy that began with people talking in a public space, not with an online course.

The three Stoics who circulate on social media (and who did not have an easy life)

The three names most quoted today lived centuries later, already in the Roman Empire. And none of them was a guru with a life all figured out.

Epictetus, the slave

He was born a slave in the 1st century, probably in Phrygia, in present-day Turkey. His name wasn't even a proper name: it means something like "the acquired one". According to ancient sources, his master broke his leg and he lived lame for the rest of his life.

When he gained his freedom, he devoted himself to teaching. He wrote nothing: what we know of him comes from the notes of his student Arrian. When Epictetus speaks of what is up to us, he is not talking about organizing your schedule better. He is talking about keeping your dignity in a life over which he had hardly any power.

Marcus Aurelius, the emperor

He ruled Rome between the years 161 and 180, amid almost constant wars on the northern borders and a devastating epidemic, the so-called Antonine Plague. And every night, exhausted, he wrote notes to himself.

He did not intend to publish them. That private diary, which we now know as the Meditations, is one of the most widely read philosophy books in the world. It is not a success manual: it is reminders, almost reproaches, from a man who was trying to keep power from turning him into someone worse. And a curiosity: Marcus Aurelius studied Epictetus' teachings with devotion. The emperor learned from the slave.

Seneca, the contradictory philosopher

He was born in Córdoba and became one of the richest and most influential men in Rome. He was tutor and adviser to Nero, one of the cruelest emperors in history. He wrote about simplicity and detachment while amassing an enormous fortune, and already in his own time he was accused of hypocrisy. His own pupil ended up ordering him to take his own life.

It is uncomfortable, and precisely for that reason interesting: Seneca is proof that knowing philosophy doesn't automatically make you a good person.

What "bro-stoicism" is

In Talks on a Park Bench, the teacher María Ferrer Tarazona calls bro-stoicism the version that circulates on social media today: a philosophy reduced to discipline, performance and control. Wake up early, train, don't feel, endure.

That version has some truth in it, but it leaves out almost everything else:

• Ethics. For the Stoics, virtue was the only true good, not success or money.
• Community. Marcus Aurelius saw himself as part of a "hive": what is not good for the hive is not good for the bee.
• Fragility and grief. Seneca wrote some of the most honest pages that exist about loss.
• Friendship. The Stoics were not hermits, but people who thought in company.

The risk of keeping only the control part is turning Stoicism into another way of demanding endlessly of yourself. We explain it in diligence versus toxic productivity.

It's not about giving up on improving

None of this means that waking up early or training is silly, or that discipline is a sham. As the book says, it doesn't come to take away your desire to improve, but to ask you, all the time, what you want to improve for, at what price and with whom.

A different way to get to the Stoics

Talks on a Park Bench tells the story of four friends, Marc, Nora, Diego and Vera, who meet almost every afternoon on the same bench. It all starts when Marc boasts of being 42 days without missing the gym thanks to a phrase from a video, and Diego answers that the phrase isn't from an influencer, but from a Greek slave called Epictetus.

From there, more than twenty philosophers, from Epictetus and Hypatia to Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, join the conversation when they are needed. Each chapter ends with practical exercises.

If you want to start with the most famous idea, read our explanation of Epictetus' dichotomy of control.