The False Promise of Stoicism

Stoics hold that you should only value things over which you have control: your judgments, emotions & character. In an attempt to avoid pain in a world in which everything you might care about is easily lost. 

Realizing that life is limited is all the more reason to value your life intensely: it requires effort, emotional investment & the risk of pain. (Someday your child may die, but that does not mean that while she’s alive you should withdraw. On the contrary, to keep yourself from loving “too much” is to keep yourself from loving). To temper emotions is to kill one’s capacity to live.

Marcus Aureliu affirms that everything that happens is divinely ordered for the best. And given his Stoic teaching, he finds that in this best of all possible worlds there is little to love. He frequently comments on the vanity of existence, the insignificance of life, the sheer pointlessness of so much of what makes up human existence.

"The Stoicism of the Meditations is fundamentally a defensive philosophy... For Marcus, life was a battle, and often it must have seemed — what in some sense it must always be — a losing battle."