Stoicism Didn't Tell You to Suffer in Silence. You Made That Up.

I was a philosophy major at McMaster University. I've read the Meditations cover to cover, studied Epictetus and Seneca in genuine academic depth, and spent years wrestling with what these philosophers actually meant — not in a sixty-second clip, not in a quote graphic sandwiched between supplement ads, but in the kind of serious, sustained engagement that forces you to actually understand something rather than just perform it.

So when I see men online using stoicism to justify suffering alone, dragging themselves out of bed at 4am to prove something to nobody, cold plunging and posting about it like it's a personality, I'm not just frustrated. I'm angry, because they're not misreading a philosophy by accident — they're deliberately repackaging it, stripping out everything that made it wise, and selling the hollow shell back to men who are already struggling.

And men are dying because of it.

What You're Actually Quoting

Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations as a private journal, and I want you to actually sit with that for a moment because it fundamentally changes everything. Not a manifesto. Not a self-help framework. Not content designed to perform strength for an audience.

A private journal, written to himself, for himself, as a way of processing the doubt, fear, grief, and crushing psychological weight of leading an empire through war and plague. The man was working through his emotions on paper every single day, examining his own failures, acknowledging his fears, wrestling honestly with mortality and loss.

And that document — that deeply personal act of emotional honesty — is what gets turned into a graphic with a dark background and a dramatic font and posted by someone trying to sell you a $997 course on becoming an alpha.

Epictetus — a man who was literally enslaved, who experienced suffering most of us cannot fathom — taught that we should focus on what we can control and release what we cannot. But that philosophy was never about suppression, never about pretending pain doesn't exist, never about grinding in silence until you collapse. It was about clarity and intentional action, about understanding yourself honestly so you could move through the world with purpose.

And Seneca, who wrote more about grief and friendship and human connection than almost any other Stoic, was explicit about the fact that we need other people — that honest relationships are essential to a well-lived life, that isolating yourself behind a wall of performed toughness is not wisdom. It's fear with better marketing.

None of them told you to wake up at 4am and film yourself doing it. None of them told you to commodify your discipline and sell it to vulnerable men. None of them told you that asking for help makes you weak.

You invented that. Or more accurately, someone who needed your credit card number invented it for you.

The Day I Realized I Was Using It as a Mask

I didn't recognize what I was doing at the time because I had dressed it up so well in the language of philosophy and discipline that it looked like strength from the outside, and felt like strength from the inside — right up until it didn't.

For years I carried PTSD, depression, and anxiety in complete silence, telling myself that was the stoic way — feel nothing visibly, show nothing publicly, keep moving no matter the cost. I had panic attacks that stretched on for hours, leaving me unable to breathe, gasping on the floor until I passed out, and then I'd pull myself back together and tell no one, because I had convinced myself that was what a strong man looked like.

With a brain injury compounding everything, stress would sometimes push me into seizures, and still I kept it buried — because I had a formal education and a barbell and a narrative about what men are supposed to be, and I was going to hold onto all three regardless of what it cost me.

The police showed up at my door twice. My friends and my therapist thought I was going to go through with it, and they weren't wrong. I was done. I was ready to quit. And every single thing I had spent years building as a mental fortress had completely failed me, because I had been using philosophy not as a tool for honest self-examination but as a sophisticated excuse to never let anyone past the wall.

When I finally got honest about what was happening, when I finally got diagnosed with PTSD and started actually talking instead of burying, I understood something that no course and no influencer and no quote graphic had ever told me: the Stoics would have been horrified by what I was doing.

The version of stoicism I had been living wasn't ancient wisdom. It was trauma in a toga.

The Grift and the Men It's Destroying

Let me be direct about what's actually happening online, because it deserves to be said plainly and without softening.

There is an entire industry — a massive, lucrative, deliberately constructed industry — built on taking men who are already in pain and selling them a framework that makes asking for help feel like personal failure. The alpha male podcast circuit, the 4am wake-up content, the cold plunge videos, the men standing in front of cameras telling you that your suffering is a choice and your weakness is a mindset and that for the low price of joining their program you too can become unshakeable.

These people are not helping men. They are exploiting them.

They are finding men at their most vulnerable — men who are genuinely searching for something to hold onto — and handing them a philosophy of suppression dressed up as empowerment, because suppressed men who feel like failures keep buying products and programs and courses in search of the version of themselves that the grift promises but never delivers.

I have watched men fall for it in real time, and I have watched what happens next. Men who looked completely unshakeable on the outside — physically imposing, publicly disciplined, performing strength constantly across every platform — completely hollowed out underneath, carrying things they couldn't name because they had been taught that naming them was weakness.

Men who had every external marker of the life these influencers promise and zero internal foundation holding any of it together. Men who had memorized Marcus Aurelius but couldn't tell their partner they were struggling, couldn't admit to their friends that they were breaking, couldn't access any part of themselves that existed beneath the performance.

Some of these men I have coached. Some I have just watched from a distance, recognizing exactly where they were headed because I had already been there — and knowing that the content they were consuming was actively making it worse.

The cruelty of the grift is that it works precisely because it gives suffering a noble name. It takes something real — the genuine Stoic emphasis on discipline, on resilience, on not being controlled by things outside yourself — and strips out everything that gave those ideas depth and wisdom and humanity, leaving behind just the performance of toughness wrapped in quotes from dead philosophers who would have despised the entire enterprise.

What Stoicism Actually Teaches

Real Stoic philosophy — the kind you encounter when you actually read the texts rather than the Instagram captions — is fundamentally about facing reality with honesty and clarity. It demands self-awareness, not self-performance. It asks you to examine your own mind rigorously and truthfully, to understand what you're actually feeling and why, to distinguish between what you can change and what you cannot, and then to act with intention rather than reaction.

By that standard, acknowledging your mental health struggles and seeking help is not a failure of stoicism. It is stoicism. You are choosing to look clearly at something real rather than construct an elaborate fiction around it. You are exercising genuine control over your response to your circumstances rather than letting shame and fear and social performance make the decision for you.

Running from it, numbing it, training twice a day to drown it out, posting discipline content to perform a version of yourself you don't actually feel — that, by any genuine Stoic measure, is the failure. You are surrendering control to something you refuse to look at, and calling that strength because someone with a podcast told you to.

Marcus Aurelius didn't perform his inner life for an audience. He examined it — honestly, privately, with full acknowledgment of his own doubt and fear — and he wrote it down not so it could be turned into content, but so that he could become better. That's the practice. That's what was actually being described.

It's been sitting there in plain text the entire time, right next to every quote that's been stolen and stripped of its meaning and sold back to you.

Final Word

If your philosophy requires you to suffer alone and perform strength for strangers on the internet, it is not philosophy — it is a product, and you are what's being sold.

Real strength is not silence. It is not the ability to endure more punishment than the next man without flinching. It is absolutely not a morning routine filmed and posted for engagement.

It is the willingness to face what is actually there — all of it, including the parts that are ugly and painful and would never perform well on camera — and to do something honest with what you find.

The Stoics knew that. They wrote it down in extraordinary detail. It has been available to anyone willing to actually read it for over two thousand years — right there, underneath all the quote graphics and course funnels and cold plunge content, waiting for someone to take it seriously.