Why Is Stoicism Trending? Memes, Coping and What the Stoics Actually Taught

Last updated: October 21, 2026

Stoicism is trending because it sells a portable answer to uncertainty: focus on what you control, accept the rest. Ryan Holiday, the man behind Daily Stoic, reaches, in the words of a 2022 WBUR Here & Now report, “hundreds of thousands of people” with a daily dose of ancient advice, and the academic Modern Stoicism project says nearly 40,000 people have signed up for its Stoic Week course since 2012. The sociologist Renata Dopierała, in a 2022 study in Qualitative Sociology Review, links the boom to financial, political, climate and health crises that have shaken people’s sense of agency and control. Whether that makes modern Stoicism a coping mechanism, and whether coping is a bad thing, is the more interesting question.

The meme gets there faster. A man in a suit stands on a sunny university lawn, but his head has been swapped for a marble bust of Marcus Aurelius, curls and beard included. The caption above reads “Me after reading 3 Marcus Aurelius quotes and watching one (1) Daily Stoic video”, and the subtitle below: “You know, I’m something of a Stoic myself.” For plenty of people, that is roughly how the Stoics arrive: a few lines, borrowed confidence.

A 2,300-Year-Old School Becomes a Meme

Stoicism became a mass trend in the 2010s through popular self-help books, daily newsletters, university outreach and online communities, and the pandemic pushed it further.

The school itself was founded around 300 BC by Zeno of Citium, who taught in a painted porch, the stoa poikilê, in the Agora of Athens, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Its second life is much younger. Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way (Portfolio, 2014) and the Daily Stoic brand turned the Roman Stoics into a morning routine, and Holiday himself told WBUR his readers are “probably the largest community of Stoics that have ever existed”.

On the academic side, a 2012 workshop at the University of Exeter produced the idea of living like a Stoic for a week. Exeter’s REF 2021 impact case study reports around 2,000 Stoic Week participants in the first year and more than 8,000 in 2018. The journalist Hettie O’Brien, writing in The Baffler in 2020, noted how much pandemic writing reached for Marcus Aurelius as consolation, and how many of the new Stoicism books are optimised for search engines. The memes came last, and they fit: self-command is easy to draw as a marble face with a caption.

From a Hanoi Prison to the Therapist’s Couch

Stoicism has a strong claim to be a coping technique, and some of its best modern advocates used it exactly that way.

Navy pilot James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam on 9 September 1965 and spent nearly eight years as a prisoner in Hanoi. In a 1993 lecture at King’s College London, published by the Hoover Institution as Courage Under Fire, he recalled telling himself as he ejected: “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.” He had met Epictetus in a Stanford philosophy course.

Psychotherapy took the same road. Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behaviour therapy, wrote in 1962 that his core principle was “originally discovered and stated by the ancient Stoic philosophers”, and Aaron Beck’s team traced the origins of cognitive therapy to the Stoics, as Donald Robertson documents with page references. The shared premise comes from Epictetus’ Handbook: people are upset not by things, but by “the principles and notions” they form about them (Elizabeth Carter’s translation, section 5). Stoic Week’s own before-and-after questionnaires, self-reported and with no control group described, found average life-satisfaction gains of about 14 percent after one week, according to the Exeter case study. That is weak evidence, though it points in one direction.

The Broics and the Red Pill Reading List

Part of the trend runs through online men’s spaces, where Stoicism is read as emotional armour and a sign of superiority, though a 2024 study of Reddit finds that picture more mixed than the headlines suggest.

The classicist Donna Zuckerberg, in Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press, 2018), studied how far-right and “Red Pill” forums use antiquity. According to a Princeton Alumni Weekly profile of Zuckerberg, she argues that these men treat Stoicism as a life hack and grasp it only superficially, and that quoting Stoic texts lets them “project the appearance of emotional control” and claim superiority over groups they perceive as angry. The Stoicism researcher Kai Whiting told Merion West in 2021 that the “Broics” have “a dangerously inaccurate idea about what it means to be Stoic”. A 2024 study by Marcus Maloney, Callum Jones and Steven Roberts in Social Media + Society complicates the story. Analysing Reddit’s r/Stoicism, the authors expected manosphere toxicity and did not find it. What they found instead was a gentler individualism that advises men to work on themselves and leaves the economic and structural sources of their anxieties out of the picture.

Is Stoicism Neoliberal Self-Help?

The “neoliberal Stoicism” critique says popular Stoicism trains people to absorb pressure privately instead of questioning where it comes from. It has serious academic backing and a fair rebuttal.

Dopierała’s study calls popular Stoicism “a new form of disciplining in a neoliberal society”, one that reinforces individualism and therapeutic culture and speaks mainly to a middle class focused on self-fulfilment. O’Brien makes the political version of the point: advice on resilience and rationality suits readers who already have plenty of room to choose, and she points out that “politics is as much about conflict as consensus”. James Booth-Jones of Erasmus University Rotterdam adds a scholarly complaint in 2025: pop-Stoic books, often written without philosophical training, leave readers “thirsty for proper explanations”.

The strongest reply is that a philosophy cannot be blamed for its paperback summaries. Asked by WBUR about readers who use Stoicism to excuse racism, misogyny or inequity, Holiday said that taking it to mean you need not care about other people is “missing the point”. Using it to put up with a situation you could have changed is a misuse. Whether the trend mostly produces that misuse is still an open empirical question, and the Reddit study cuts against the gloomier answer.

What Epictetus Actually Put in the Control Column

Epictetus’ dichotomy of control is a claim about where good and bad are found, and it comes attached to a list of duties toward other people.

The famous opening of the Handbook reads: “Some things are in our control and others not.” What is ours: opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, our own actions. What is not: “body, property, reputation, command”. The Handbook is a short digest of the Discourses, which were written up by Arrian of Nicomedia, and Epictetus, according to the SEP, spent part of his life enslaved to Epaphroditus. That biography matters. The man drawing the line had lived without legal control over his own body, which makes the teaching harder to read as a luxury product.

The second Stoic meme on this page tests the same line on a portfolio. A man in a suit stands with his arms crossed in front of a blue stock-market board, his head swapped for an engraved portrait of a bearded ancient philosopher, while an orange arrow plunges and a glowing label reads “Stoic”. The caption has him hit rock bottom and stay positive “because you follow stoicism”. The joke lands on lowercase indifference to losses, and it invites the usual follow-up: the Stoics could shrug off a crash because they were rich.

Book 7 of Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives gives a messier picture (R. D. Hicks’ Loeb translation on LacusCurtius). Zeno reportedly turned to philosophy after being shipwrecked “with a cargo of purple”, though Diogenes also passes on a report that he came to Greece with more than a thousand talents. His pupil and successor Cleanthes arrived in Athens, “as some people say, with four drachmas only”, and drew water in gardens by night while studying by day. Add the formerly enslaved Epictetus, and the school’s teachers fit no single wealth bracket.

The part that rarely makes it into a meme comes later, in section 30: “Duties are universally measured by relations.” Being a son, a brother, a neighbour, a citizen each brings obligations, and the Stoic is supposed to work out and meet them. The everyday word adds to the confusion. Merriam-Webster gives lowercase “stoic” as “a person who accepts what happens without complaining or showing emotion”, while the SEP notes that the school allowed the wise person good feelings toward genuine goods. The stoic face meme is about the lowercase word. What is Stoicism? covers the difference in more detail.

The Emperor Who Wrote About the Swarm

Marcus Aurelius, the face of many Stoic memes, wrote a private notebook in which justice and the common good come up again and again.

The Meditations were, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, written by Marcus “to himself and for his own use”, probably on campaign in central Europe around 171 to 175 AD. Nobody was meant to screenshot them. In George Long’s translation, Marcus asks whether anything in life is better than “justice, truth, temperance, fortitude” (3.6), puts justice first, and later writes that “in justice the other virtues have their foundation” (11.10). He also argues that if humans share reason, “the world is in a manner a state” (4.4). His city is Rome as Antoninus, but as a human being “it is the world”, and the shortest version says that what is “not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee” (6.44 and 6.54). The SEP entry on cosmopolitanism sums up the school’s view that goodness requires serving other human beings as best one can.

Seneca shows the limits as well as the reach of this. In Letter 47 he answers “They are slaves” with “Nay, rather they are men” (Gummere translation), urges masters to treat slaves decently, and still stops short of calling for abolition. In Letter 7 he calls the midday arena show mere butchery, in a letter that warns his friend against crowds. Neither letter proposes reform; both find fault with ordinary Roman habits.

A Coping Mechanism With Homework Attached

Stoicism works as a way of coping, and the ancient texts suggest it was always meant to, but the original version expects the person who has calmed down to go back and do their duties.

The test is what happens after the breathing exercise. Stockdale used Epictetus to survive and then to lead fellow prisoners. Marcus used his notebook to get through wars and still ran an empire, for better and worse. The modern trend tends to keep the first half: sort what you control from what you don’t, and feel better. The second half, measuring duties by relations and treating the swarm as part of your own good, is what turns the first half from pain relief into an ethics. Where exactly the line falls in public life, at the ballot box or the checkout, is the argument the Silicon Valley Stoicism post picks up.

The Stoics did not invent their indifference to wealth and status from scratch: From Cynicism to Stoicism traces how Diogenes of Sinope laid the groundwork.