I can’t believe I didn’t know about Stoicism until 2023. More precisely, I can’t believe I didn’t know about philosophy until 2023. So, what is Stoicism?
Stoicism was founded in Ancient Greece by Zeno(芝诺) of Citium in the early 3rd century BC, but was practised by the likes of Epictetus(伊比鸠鲁), Cato(加图), Seneca(塞内加) and Marcus Aurelius(马库斯奥斯留). Yes, I’ve heard those names from history books. If you’re a Chinese student, I’m sure you’ve heard them too.
I learnt about Stoicism from a book called Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius, but Stoicism is not a concrete thing. Actually, It’s a kind of idea, and the most famous Stocis never wrote anything down for publication. Yeah, Marcus Aurelius never intended his Meditations to be anything but personal. Later generations collected his notes and organised them into a book, which is the Meditations.
Marcus Aurelius recorded his experiences and feelings in the form of a diary. More precisely, he was giving advice to himself, but as readers we can assume that those advice are for ourselves. I seem to have been influenced by Stoicism, lol. It seems that I was giving advice to myself in articles, but in fact those advice are potentially useful to readers.
Ok, let’s back to the topic again - what is Stoicism?
After reading the Meditations, you may have a feeling that you could have an unshakeable happiness in this life, and the road to achiveing this goal, in turn, lay in understanding that destructive emotions, like anger and jealousy, are under our conscious control - they don’t have to control us, because we can learn to control them. In the words of Epictetus:” External events I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them, I do control.”
The modern day phiosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a Stoic as someone who has a different perspective on experiences which most of us would see as wholly negative:
a Stoic ‘transforms fear into caution, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking’. So, are you a Stoic?
I had some bad experiences when I was a teenager. At the time I felt very lost and I thought I might be suffering from depression. I wished I had a wise man to guide me, but unfortunately, no. Everything would have been different if I had known about Stoicism at the time.