reflections6 min read
Modern Stoicism: What It Is, and What Held Up After 5 Years
Modern Stoicism is two different things sharing one name. Here is the difference, and which of the practices survived five years of weekly use.
Modern Stoicism is two different things sharing one name: an organised revival, run by academics and psychotherapists, that asks you to complete timed exercises, and a popular self-improvement register that asks you to adopt a posture. Both call themselves Stoicism. Only one of them gives you something to do on a Sunday evening.
I have written a structured reflection every week for more than five years, built on the Stoic material. This piece covers what the term means, and then the part nobody publishing on this topic seems willing to write: which of the practices held up over that period, and which I stopped doing.
The Two Things Called Modern Stoicism
| The organised revival | The popular version | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A collaboration between academics and psychotherapists, running Stoic Week and the Stoicon conference | A tone found in quote accounts, podcasts, and productivity content |
| What it asks of you | Complete a timed course of exercises and report what happened | Adopt an attitude, usually about not caring |
| Where it points | Ancient texts read as instructions | Ancient texts read as aphorisms |
| Its failure mode | Feels academic, easy to abandon after week one | Produces a self-image rather than a practice |
The organised version is a genuine institution. Modern Stoicism describes itself as a collaboration between academics and psychotherapists, and it is the group behind Stoic Week and Stoicon.
The revival is also measurable. Penguin sold roughly 12,000 copies of Meditations in 2012 and about 100,000 in 2019, a figure reported in USC Dornsife's account of the philosophy's return. Somewhere in that climb, a body of exercises turned into an aesthetic.
What Makes It Modern Is That It Went Through a Therapist
The interesting fact about the organised revival is who runs it. Not only classicists, but psychotherapists, which is why the movement's own framing is a collaboration between the two.
That has a consequence worth stating plainly, because it explains why any of this survives contact with a normal week. Modern Stoicism is organised as exercises you run, not doctrines you believe. You are not asked to accept a cosmology. You are asked to write down what upset you and look at whether it was inside your control. A practice built that way translates into a weekly habit. A belief system does not.
Three Things the Popular Version Gets Wrong
It treats calm as the goal. Calm is a by-product. If you make it the target, every ordinary bad week reads as a failure of practice, and you start performing equanimity instead of examining anything.
It reads examination as suppression. The questions are not there to help you feel less. They are there to find out what you expected from the world that the world did not deliver. That is why my own weekly entry asks what made me angry rather than instructing me not to be.
It consumes quotes instead of running one question. A Marcus Aurelius line in a feed costs nothing and changes nothing. One question, answered honestly in writing, once a week, is the whole of it. The gap between those two activities is the gap between the two things in the table above.
What Held Up After Five Years, and What I Dropped
This is the part the explainers cannot write, so here it is. The framework I run is the one William B. Irvine sets out in A Guide to the Good Life; the full checklist sits on my reflection template page rather than being restated here. What follows is only the verdict.
| Practice | How long I ran it | Verdict | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly written reflection | 5+ years, ongoing | Kept | Weekly turned out to be the sweet spot for me. It is frequent enough to keep the detail and rare enough to have something to say |
| Daily morning and evening reflection | The early years | Dropped | It became a rule I was obeying. I do not want to end up a self-improving machine that forgets to live along the way |
| Three things I am grateful for | 5+ years, ongoing | Kept | It works when one of the three is small enough to be slightly embarrassing. Grand answers are a sign of going through the motions |
| Separating what I control from what I do not | 5+ years, ongoing | Kept, and the hardest | Most useful applied to goals, where it means setting the target on preparation rather than the result |
| Being hard on myself in the entry | The early years | Dropped | I used to be harshly self-critical, especially about work, and mistook it for rigour. The section works better without it |
Two of five dropped, and both drops were about strictness rather than content. That is the pattern I would tell anyone starting: the philosophy survives, the discipline theatre does not.
The Modern Problems the Ancient Texts Do Not Cover
"Modern" in most writing on this topic means the philosophy is old and we are new. Used honestly it should mean something narrower: the specific conditions Seneca did not have to write about.
Comparison at algorithmic scale. Envy is in the source material. Envy delivered continuously by a system optimised to produce it is not. My entry asks who I envied and what specifically they have, because naming the specific thing usually reveals it is not what I want, only what I was shown.
Notification load. The Stoics wrote about attention as a matter of choice. It is now also a matter of design. The weekly question that does the work is where my attention went that I did not choose.
Work as identity. Being a title rather than a person is a modern arrangement, and it makes ordinary professional setbacks feel existential. This is the condition behind most of what I have written about walking away from a job that looked correct on paper.
Optionality paralysis. More available paths than any previous generation, and a resulting inability to commit to one. The Stoic move is useful here: decide what is inside your control this week, and stop auditing the alternatives.
If You Want the Practice and Not the Aesthetic
Three doors, depending on what you want:
- The container: my weekly reflection template, the file I open every week. Free.
- How a week looks: how I keep a stoic journal, including a genuine entry.
- If you prefer questions to a system: 100 journal prompts from the same practice.
Modern Stoicism FAQ
Is modern Stoicism the same as ancient Stoicism? No. The ancient version is a complete philosophy including physics and cosmology. The modern revival keeps the psychological exercises and largely leaves the metaphysics alone, which is why it is often described as Stoic practice rather than Stoic belief.
Who are the modern Stoics? The organised revival is run by a group of academics and psychotherapists behind Stoic Week and Stoicon. Separately, a much larger popular readership encountered the philosophy through Meditations and through online writing during the 2010s.
Is modern Stoicism worth practising? The exercises are cheap to test. One structured written reflection a week for a month is enough to know whether it does anything for you, which is a far better test than reading another book about it.