Stoic toughness can mean staying steady enough to choose your response when something upsets you. In this short episode, I question the version of strength built around aggression and look at the difference between being loud and being grounded. The useful test is how you act when your composure gets challenged.
This episode was published in April 2024. Its metal metaphor goes too far when it treats being emotionally affected as weakness. The companion below makes that distinction explicit; the historical recording and transcript retain the original argument.
Being loud tells us very little
A person can dominate a room and still lose their footing over a small criticism. Someone quieter might take the same criticism, think about it, and answer without making the situation worse. Volume doesn't tell us which person is handling the moment well.
In the episode I compare toughness to a metal that holds its shape under pressure. There's something useful in that image: an insult doesn't have to decide your next action. But people aren't pieces of metal. We need to respond to the world, learn from criticism and care when something goes wrong.
Steadiness has to leave room for feeling. Otherwise the metaphor becomes another way to judge yourself for having a human reaction.
The first reaction is not a verdict on your character
The recording calls someone “soft” if an insult affects them emotionally. That is too broad. Seneca distinguishes the involuntary jolt from the angry judgement and action that can follow it. A shaking voice or a flush of embarrassment does not establish that someone has failed at Stoicism. His account in On Anger makes room for bodily reactions even in a brave person.
The same limit applies to the episode's reference to neuroticism. A personality trait is not a measure of moral worth, and “soft” is not a useful diagnosis. You can feel something strongly and still act with care.
The question worth keeping from the talk is a smaller one. When you notice yourself replaying a criticism, can you look at the story you're adding before you answer? That is the meditation suggestion in the episode: get familiar with thoughts as they arise, so you have a chance to examine them.
If a boundary needs setting, set it. If you need to leave, leave. Staying grounded doesn't require staying available for mistreatment, and changing your mind in response to good evidence is part of practical wisdom.
For the wider argument, read The Manosphere Got Stoicism Backwards. For a more detailed account of responding to anger, see Seneca's practical techniques.
Sources: Jon Brooks's April 2024 recording supplies the metal analogy and meditation suggestion. Seneca's On Anger supplies the distinction between an involuntary reaction and anger we go on to endorse. The link above supports the clarification; the episode does not give a passage number. The recording's closing promise that philosophy will stop the world affecting you should be read as an overstatement, not an outcome the practice guarantees.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
Historical transcript: the “softness” claims and promise of becoming unaffected are preserved as spoken, with the corrections above. They are not standards for judging your worth or anyone else's.
What does it mean to be a tough person? What does it mean to be too soft? I've been accused of all different kinds of adjectives. I've been accused in the past of being too tough, too aggressive in my approach. I've also been accused about being too soft, too soft as a parent, too soft as a person. And I'd like to just share my thoughts on what it means to be tough. A lot of us think that a tough person is someone that acts ferociously, with power, with dominance, with aggression. A tough person is the loud-mouthed fighter who doesn't take any nonsense from anyone.
And this may be semantics, but I wouldn't call such a person tough. I would call such a person assertive. I would call such a person a strong boundary setter. I would call such a person powerful or energetic or short tempered or enthusiastic, but not tough. And the reason why is because to me toughness is not something you do. It's a way of being in response to the world. If we think of a tough metal, we think of that metal as durable, resilient, hard, difficult to bend, not very malleable, hard to scratch.
That is a tough material. The metal doesn't need to jump out at us, doesn't need to talk to us for it to be tough. Conversely, a soft metal is the type of metal that can be poked and prodded and bent out of shape. In other words, the environment can assert a force on that metal and change the characteristics or the form. So this is how I like to think of toughness and softness in people. If you're a tough person, your form doesn't change in response to the environment. You get a big compliment, you get a big rejection, you have something nice happen to you, you get insulted, you have good news, you have bad news, but the form remains the same.
That is toughness. Softness, on the other hand, is closely associated with neuroticism and the big five personality traits, a sensitivity to negative emotion. You can be a very assertive person, you can be a forceful person, but if the compliment of someone you care about affects you strongly emotionally, if an insult from an enemy affects you emotionally, you are by definition soft. You are not made out of hard stuff. Many people think that anger is a sign of toughness. Anger is a sign of being strong. But the Stoics would disagree with this.
They would say that anger is actually a sign of weakness, of softness. It's not a tough quality. Because anger comes from being ruffled and upset by the world around you. It means the material, the stuff that you are made from, is changing in its form in response to how other people and how the world affects you. I think it's good to reflect on this because sometimes we think that we're not tough for some reason. Maybe we think that we don't stand up for ourselves enough. Maybe we're not the loudest person in the room.
But in my opinion, if you can hold your form, if you can stay grounded in a storm, you are as tough as they come. And the loudest, most popular person who gets upset by a little comment, to me, they show their fragility in that moment, their vulnerability. They are not tough. Now, in an ideal world, we can be assertive and compassionate and tough and tender, balanced and whole when the time suits, that is practical wisdom, knowing what to do in the right measure and when. So the next question then is well, how do you increase your toughness?
Well, meditation is a really good way to practise cultivating strength because you realise that you aren't your thoughts. The storyline you are telling yourself about how that person has upset you, you soon realise after meditating enough that's not necessarily the whole story. And in fact, you can let that story go. The mind and the thoughts sometimes they think themselves, and you are not the one making it. When we spend enough time in meditation, it could be almost amusing to see what the mind comes up with rather than triggering. This is a good sign of progress, by the way, when you start to have this sense of play.
And also, of course, Stoicism, Stoic philosophy or any type of ancient philosophy where they encourage reason and wisdom and a philosophy of life. Learning who you are, learning how your perceptions and your emotions work, developing a system for how to think and act in life will stop you from being affected by the world around you. I hope you've enjoyed me talking about this distinction between toughness and softness, and I encourage you to look out for these traits as you go through the world.
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