how stoicism is ruining your life

Summary

stoicism cut my anxiety. it also flattened my emotional life in ways I didn’t notice for years. one study says it cuts depression in half. another says it doubles suicide risk. both are true depending on which stoicism you’re practicing.

naive stoicism: suppress emotion, detach from outcomes, accept everything, isolate yourself. looks tough. is actually slow-motion self-harm.

authentic stoicism: regulate emotion, take action on what you control, accept what you can’t, stay connected to people. that’s the version Marcus Aurelius and Seneca actually practiced.

four traps to watch for:

1. negative visualization done chronically becomes catastrophizing.
2. “control what you can” becomes learned helplessness if you stop trying.
3. detachment from outcomes becomes detachment from people.
4. composure becomes apathy if you forget that the goal was self-mastery, not numbness.

daily checklist I run: morning intention, evening review, gratitude pass, one hard thing. that’s it. stoicism as a tool, not an identity.

Transcript

is stoicism dangerous or powerful?

Does stoicism make you depressed? So I’m going to be talking about that today because as an entrepreneur, I do believe that being a stoic, stoicism in general, that philosophy is great for getting through the storm of entrepreneurship. There are emotional roller coaster rides and most of self-development is really learning how to battle yourself and take control of your mind and there are so many methods to be able to do that.

Understanding stoicism is one of the best. So I have two different studies here sitting on my desk and the first one was done in 2024. It was a stoic week study of 4200 participants and it said that seven days of guided stoic exercises cut depression vulnerability scores by 13.3% and anxiety by 12.5%.

two conflicting studies on stoicism

So that’s definitely a checkbox for stoicism, right? But then there’s another one, it was a 2024 latent profile study of 488 men in the subgroup labeled stoics showed 2.32 times higher lifetime suicide attempt risk over their peers. Definitely a strike against stoicism. Now where does this confusion come in and how can we embrace it?

Because as an entrepreneur, I really believe it is a storm of emotional activity. There’s a lot that goes on in mastering yourself. Part of becoming a master of yourself in self-development is embracing some form of stoicism. I really believe that it’s a key philosophy that you can embrace with any other religious ideology and really see success.

But there is a dark side to it when it’s not done properly and the confusion is in the definition of stoicism itself. If you were to just Google right now the definition of stoicism, you’re going to see that there are two definitions. The first one is just going to be the endurance of hardship without flinching, basically.

Just being able to shove down the emotion, even if bad things happen, you don’t flinch. It’s just not a big deal. The other definition of stoicism is the actual Greek school of philosophy known as stoicism that has to do with virtues and living in accordance with nature, all of these different things.

naive vs. authentic stoicism

Sometimes I think we get confused about what stoicism actually is. So today I’m going to go over that. I’m going to go over how stoicism can turn depressive, the four different ways and how you can avoid that, and then kind of give you a checklist to make sure that you’re on track if you want to utilize stoicism as a base ideology for getting through entrepreneurship and on your journey to self-mastery.

Now I’ve thought a lot about this over the years because the tough guy stoicism, which in the research they call naive stoicism, it’s just being the stoic, the first definition that you will read if you were to Google the definition of stoicism, that comes easy to me naturally. I don’t know if it’s my military background, my upbringing, whatever it is, stoicism, the naive stoicism comes to me naturally.

And when I go too far down that path, the naive stoicism route, I start to end up in a place of apathy. And too much apathy is a really bad thing. And two points in my life, this has really hit home, one more recently and one in the past. I’ll start with the example in the past, I was in basic training and a military commander who was giving me my assessment about 75% of the way through the training.

He was like, Moon, you either really don’t give a shit or you just don’t get rattled and we need to find out which one it is. Because not getting rattled under pressure is one thing, but not showing any emotion because you just actually don’t care is a completely different thing and not one that you really want.

my military story: apathy vs. composure

That’s not a trait that you want. It’s not the person who you want to be. And I’ve thought a lot about that ever since that moment in time, but more recently, my oldest son asked me, basically, why am I the way that I am? He wasn’t asking in any kind of negative context, but it was like, I don’t get overly excited when really good things happen and I don’t get overly down when bad things happen.

And he was asking me about that and where that comes from. And it’s very cool to see your children become more insightful and learn things about you, but it definitely makes me question where I’m at on the stoicism radar. Am I in the naive stoicism where I’m just trying to be a tough guy and bottling up emotion?

Or am I going down what they call authentic stoicism, which is actually really beneficial. It can lead to a better mental health, less anxiety, less depressive state, all of those things. And if you want to practice one versus the other, there’s a thin line separating the two. So let’s go over the four traps that you could come into if you are not wanting stoicism to turn into a depressive state.

So the first trap is emotional suppression. So what happens to the naive stoic is that they just bottle up all of their feelings. They’re irritable and they just don’t ever really deal with them. I think we know plenty of people like that, right? The true stoic philosophy would have you name the emotion and decide how to act, but not pretend that it isn’t there.

four stoic traps that spiral mental health

And that’s a lot in the, that’s very frequent in the stoic philosophy is that you have to ask yourself what’s in your control and what’s outside of your control. And you’re allowed to feel emotions. It’s not that you’re bottling it up and you’re trying to be this fake facade of I can handle this. It doesn’t affect me.

It doesn’t matter because if you’re just putting on the front, it’s going to eat you alive on the inside. And I don’t want that for you. I certainly don’t want it for me. So that’s the first one is emotional suppression. Be aware of whether or not you’re doing that. The second thing in this one I am very bad at is chronic negative visualization without gratitude bounce back.

So what can drag you down in this one is that you just marinate in worst case scenarios and you think it’s a preparation. You think it’s philosophy. I do this all the time. I’m always thinking about plan A, B, C, D, E, like all the options, thinking about worst case scenarios, trying to plan for them, which as an entrepreneur is really good sometimes, but it can get out of control.

Now if you were to look at the get away from the naive stoicism and into actual stoic philosophy, you’d see that there’s a lot of gratitude inside of stoic literature. You should be grateful. You should express your gratitude on a daily basis, not just sit around and think about worst case scenarios.

It is okay to plan and prepare. You can be like, okay, what if this happens? What’s my plan? Write it all down. Then finish that session with now what are three things I’m grateful for? That’s practicing more authentic stoicism and not just the naive stoicism that’s going to lead to this depressive and anxious state.

Now the fourth one or the third one is self-reliance to the point of isolation. A lot of stoics, the naive stoics think that they don’t need anybody, right? They can do this on their own. They’re tough. They can just handle it all, right? Lack of social support is a major depression predictor. Not having people that you talk to, not having a community group, not having anyone to reach out to.

I’m not talking about just complaining to your friends about stuff. I’m just talking about an actual community support system with similar people who are going through maybe what you’re going through, especially as an entrepreneur, community is very important. If you just lack all of that social support, that’s not stoicism.

That’s just naive stoicism leading you down a dangerous path. But Marcus Aurelius wrote letters of most of his stoic philosophy. Not only is he journaling these thoughts, some of them were actually going out, right? Or at least they’re getting out of his mind and onto paper and having conversations about them.

You need a support group in your stoic journey. Just because you are stoic doesn’t mean that you don’t need to talk to people, that you don’t need help. We all need help. We all need a community. Now the last one that goes directly in line with that one is instead of focusing on virtues, you just focus on never asking for help.

And so when you don’t ever ask for help, you’re going to start to spiral and you again are going to go down this line of thinking that this is the stoic behavior. This is who you should be if you’re trying to have that facade of being the tough guy. But ultimately you need to call on somebody. You need help.

Whether that is the community I’m kind of mentioning or whether that’s just one singular person, therapy, whatever it is, all of that is okay. To be the fake stoic is to think that you can do all of this on your own and let your mental health deteriorate. But real authentic stoicism is to be, you know, happy.

That’s what we’re chasing, right? But it’s not letting our emotions control us. It’s to have the gratitude. It’s to focus on the four main virtues that stoicism creates or that preaches. They preach, they teach in all of the stoic literature. Now I want to kind of end with like just a checklist that you can go through as you are trying to build up your own mental capacity and mastering yourself with stoicism.

And the first is think of a dichotomy of control, not dichotomy of feelings. So you can label events as controllable or uncontrollable and then you just feel whatever comes up and then you respond rationally. So that’s a really big point in the emotional roller coaster of entrepreneurship. We’re going to feel things.

practicing real stoicism: daily checklist

Things are going to come up, right? And it’s okay to feel those. You don’t have to pretend that you’re not. You feel those feelings but then you have to know what is in your control and what’s outside of your control. Because if you’re just anxious for no reason, things are bottled up, you’re really anxious about something that might not even happen, things that are outside of your control, you can’t control that.

So you can now act rationally and not have to face that with anxiety, right? So that’s the first thing is making sure you’re asking yourself what’s in your control and what’s not in your control. The second is a daily review with data. So very common in stoic literature, you’re going to start with a morning intention and then an evening audit.

So you’re going to kind of think of what your intention is for the day. Maybe it’s temperance as one of the virtues and you’re going to be more patient with customers or your family or whoever today than you typically are. That’s what we want to focus on, right? That is the goal for the day, the intention of the day.

You write that in the morning, in the evening you assess how did I do on that specific virtue? How did I handle the situation? How did I do today overall? Next you want a community of equals. Iron sharpens iron, iron does not sharpen clay. You want other people on this journey, on this path with you who can help you get better.

That’s not necessarily within the stoic literature, but I think going back to that community portion of all this, I think that it’s very, very important. Then you need to test the effect. You need to track your mood on a scale of zero to 10 for a month. So if the graph is like going down, that’s obviously no good, but that’s something that I think a lot of people don’t do and you should really try it out.

So if you are having a lot of bad days and you start to feel like they’re piling up, start to journal those. Plot them on a graph, put them on your calendar. Scale of one to 10. Okay, today was a one. Today was a nine. Today was an eight. And start to look at what was happening in your day and give that day a rating so you can decide how you’re feeling over time and maybe you can start to cut out activities that do not serve you.

Maybe they’re not within your nature and you shouldn’t be doing them. And then know the red line. So know when things are getting to that apathetic standpoint that I was talking about. If you’re getting to a point where you just actually don’t care, that’s the danger zone. For me, that’s the danger zone.

I have to go back to like, okay, am I actually trying to live a specific virtue? Am I practicing gratitude on a daily basis? Am I getting help? Do I have a community of peers? These are the things that I have to look at to make sure that I’m towing that line between naive stoicism, the tough guy stoicism, and authentic stoicism, which is an actual school and philosophy and practice.

the goal: self-mastery, not suppression

And when I’m on the side of doing things that were actually taught in stoicism and not fake naive stoicism, I actually do have more happiness. I have more fulfillment and it’s not apathy. It’s more regulation. And that’s what I want. I’m okay with regulating my emotions through being rational, but I don’t want to go down the path of complete apathy.

And going through all of this, the only reason you’d want to do any of it is self mastery, trying to master yourself so you can be better. And when you’re better, your business is better and it will grow faster. To do any of this, you’re going to have to try harder.