I remember vividly the evening my Dad had a stroke. I was in my university flat in Edinburgh, sitting down to a Sex and the City marathon with friends. A nearby cousin drove miles to knock on our door and give me the message in person, expecting me to collapse into her arms. Instead, I listened, packed a bag and walked calmly to her car. She drove me to the airport in silence.
I can picture myself moving through the empty Gatwick corridors after landing in London at an ungodly hour. Bloc Party’s song Biko playing on repeat in my headphones; the lyrics ‘You have crossed the River Styx / and the waves have taken you away’ delivering a perfect requiem. Letting some of those waves wash over me too, holding the idea that this could be the moment my dad’s already dimming light would be snuffed out.
There we were, confronted with a major stroke after his decade-long battle with cancer; a body that had proven resilient was older now, and fragile. It made sense. And I wanted to sit with the idea, walk around and through it until I knew all its pathways, making peace with it before seeing my family, who would need me to do practical things as we planned for what might come next.
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The chorus hit as I walked towards the sliding doors of the hospital, a blurred outline of my mum behind them: ‘So toughen up, Biko, toughen up.’ And that’s exactly what I did.
It feels weird to call myself a Stoic. The word is often and easily misconstrued; its Ancient Greek principles of reason, neutrality and persistent self-control fell out of favour in the Sixties when emotional expression, talking therapy and empathy became the preferred approach to mental health. It might sound like a leaning towards self-flagellation or, worse, martyrdom, but stoicism’s original doctrines are all strong, enabling tenets to live by. They include steeling yourself, evaluating and moderating your emotions, keeping an even keel in the face of turbulent times and accepting the inevitability of death. The original Stoics, including Seneca and Epictetus, believed in grieving loved ones while they are still alive, familiarising yourself with the feelings so that they don’t later incapacitate you.
While the ancient philosophy’s popularity has fluctuated since it was first conceived in the 3rd century BC, stoicism is on the rise, particularly among my age group. Print sales of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic shot up by 42% in 2020. And the popular Daily Stoic Instagram account, with its grounding quotes from Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, has a 1.8 million-strong following. ‘We’ve now got two generations of millennials who’ve grown up without organised religion, without a belief framework. Yet there’s still a need to have rules or guidance. And stoicism provides pretty much cradle-to-grave advice about how to handle everything from romantic rejection to our own mortality,’ explains Brigid Delaney, author of Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in Chaotic Times. And so we’ve revived it, co-opting it to suit the current zeitgeist. There’s a whole chapter on stoicism as a way of ‘fear-hacking’ in bestselling self-help author Caroline Foran’s recent book The Confidence Kit. Meanwhile, tech bros like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday have used it to develop cult followings, delivering stoicism to Silicon Valley as a way to reconcile great wealth and excess with some idea of piety. Anyone can listen to Holiday’s ‘Stoicism for Modern Life’ meditation series on the Calm app, which offers its principles as an alternative to Buddhism to help you ‘find peace within the noise of everyday life’.
Having practised stoicism for so long, I hope that people won’t cling to it too tightly. I say this from a place of experience with its downsides. But it is easy to see why it has become an anchor to many in this era of pandemonium and catastrophe.
There was, of course, the pandemic. As it raged and we all had to face the idea of losing those precious to us, helpless as we tried to counter a disease we hadn’t yet got to know, the need to focus only on the things in our control became important for everyone. Stoicism is, I would argue, one of the surest ways of protecting yourself against big, scary, external phenomena – like pestilence, war and global warming – because it teaches you to be sage about things you can’t personally influence. ‘The things that we’re going through, humans have gone through before, and the Stoics lived in a time not unlike our own. There was a lot of excess, a lot of inequality,’ Delaney says. In the past few years, we’ve all had to live with the discomfort of death and sickness without going to pieces. We’ve had to find an equilibrium, despite the threat of Putin’s arsenal and being at the mercy of a shambolic UK government.
While some have confronted it only recently, intimations of mortality have underpinned most of my life. I first looked death in the face when I was 13. My grandfather was ailing and we raced to his bedside only to be 30 minutes late; just enough time for him to have developed a waxy, pallid complexion, his mouth ajar as if something might have exited that way. Then, when I was 15, my dad discovered he had cancer. The day he found out, he pretended he was fine so my mum could celebrate her 50th birthday. But when the party was over, the return to earth was more brutal than expected, with frequent emergency trips to hospital and invasive surgeries that spanned a decade. During that period, my older sister died suddenly of a grand mal seizure. Her death brought up complicated feelings and a lot of self-reckoning: she and I had had a strained relationship, and it was difficult to reconcile that with her sudden absence.
My dad survived cancer and the stroke, but later went on to have a heart attack on Christmas Eve in 2018, and was in a coma in ICU over New Year. He’s still alive today, if you can believe it. His power to rebound is astounding. But my relationship with death is now a familiar one. The door opened in front of me so many times that I’ve practically had The Reaper round for tea. And my response to it is measured: I know that people die, the world still turns.
Despite how I might personally have fallen into it, stoicism isn’t all about enduring trauma or suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Quite the contrary. The original premise of stoicism was joy. ‘The Stoics weren’t preaching repression – they wanted you to enjoy yourself,’ explains Delaney.
‘They wanted you to have a big, happy, fruitful, contributing life and not suffer too much with the anxiety of imagining the worst or stressing about what people think.’ In many ways, modern stoicism is the antidote to ‘snowflake’ culture: it teaches you to be resilient, to not be triggered too easily, to take inconvenience in your stride, to find beauty and pleasure in small moments and to maximise the time you have with the people you cherish.
For me, this rings true. I am, at my core, an unwavering optimist. Bracing myself to get through something isn’t merely a test of endurance – it is because I have a strong sense of the light at the end of the tunnel; that this too shall pass, and when it does, there are better, more wonderful, unmissable things on the horizon. When it comes to my dad’s illness, I have been able to picture at least the freedom my mum might have, when she’s no longer nursing him. During perinatal depression, I focused on the fullness of the experience that was to come when my son was born. Balancing out the worry and pain with the steadfast knowledge that there will also be joy is what gives me stability. Leaning on stoicism to work out what is in my control in order to make a plan, or distract myself with a good book if I decide there’s nothing I can do about it, is a tactic that any good CBT therapist might advise.
And yet, just as stoicism has become the philosophy that everyone is talking about, I can’t help noticing more and more of its pitfalls. Composure in moments of emotional distress makes my decision-making sharp, but it doesn’t always make me relatable. We’ve spent decades telling people that it’s healthier to open up about their feelings, to share their worries and seek support from their family, friends and even Instagram followers. So while I’m being quietly practical as my nearest and dearest hug and weep, I can seem unfeeling. Some question whether I really care. In those moments, even though stoicism teaches you not to pay mind to how others see you, I’m aware that an emotional display would bring comfort to the people I love.
Stoicism also rocks the bonds of my relationship with my husband. As Delaney puts it, there is an ‘anti-vulnerability’ aspect to its practices. Having evolved from being primarily matches of status and convenience, modern marriages are about connection, partnership, love, appreciation and commonality. Being vulnerable is absolutely key. My stoicism can be a brick wall between us. It messes with the vows we made because, while I’m certainly capable of getting ‘through thick and thin’, it doesn’t always feel to him as if we’re doing it together or that it’s bringing us closer.
Leading American philosopher Martha Nussbaum talks about this being one of the main limitations of stoicism in her book Upheavals of Thought. ‘We aren’t very loving creatures, apparently, when we philosophise,’ she writes. This means that if we focus too hard on our ability to reason – to the point where we stem the flow of natural emotion – it can get in the way of important attachments. ‘Emotions are forms of evaluative judgement,’ she continues. ‘As hope alternates uneasily with fear, as a single event transforms hope into grief, as grief expresses itself as anger... all of these can be the vehicles of an underlying love. They see their object as invested with value or importance, or evidence of irrevocable loss.’ Our sense of identity is built on knowing where we stand with people, whom we cherish, whom we would die for, how much we love and care, and without access to that framework, wouldn’t we be a little bit lost?
The other thing that Nussbaum emphasises is emotion’s ability to ‘move [us] to action’. This is where stoicism really falls down: in the contemporary context of social justice.
‘Throughout history, we have seen the power of rage. Anger has galvanised groups to bring about collective change, to start revolutions and to overcome oppression,’ says author and activist Soma Sara. If too many of us focused solely on what we felt was in our immediate, personal control and ignored what anyone else thought of us, petitions wouldn’t get signed and protests would never happen.
Relying on reason has helped me through the chaos of losing people. Shutting out the noise has walked me through fire and flood to the joy at the other side. But there is no way of being in control at all times without also being detached from people. Sometimes, you have to be a little bit helpless to take the risk of putting your own emotional wellbeing in the hands of something or someone else. Let the rational mind of stoicism help you grieve when something is gone, but don’t let it stop you from attaching yourself to it in the first place. These attachments form the richness of life. If giving birth to my son has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t hole up your feelings in a fortress when a little piece of your heart now lives outside of you – so I’m learning how to bring (some of) the walls back down.
Natasha Bird is the Former Executive Editor (Digital) of ELLE.
