The manosphere has spent years selling young men a version of Stoicism built on suppressed emotion and dominance. But the actual texts say the opposite. Marcus Aurelius wrote that gentleness is manlier than rage, Seneca admitted weeping for a friend, and Epictetus said losing your temper costs you your humanity, not gains it.
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The "broicism" problem
You've probably seen the aesthetic: black-and-white footage, AI narration, marble busts, captions reading "real men feel nothing." The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has a name for it: broicism, an attempt to borrow the language of Stoic philosophy to sell young men a version of manhood built on suppression and dominance.
The men watching those videos aren't wrong to be looking. Fifteen percent of men in the US now report having no close friends, a fivefold increase since 1990, and the Surgeon General has called male loneliness a public health crisis. The search for answers is real. What they're finding isn't Stoicism, though. It's a cartoon of it.
What Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus actually wrote
Marcus Aurelius is the face of half the broicism content online, the stone-faced emperor who trained himself out of feeling. Except in Meditations 11.18, writing a private note to himself never intended for publication, he says the opposite: "It isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human and therefore manlier" (Gregory Hays' translation). Book One of the Meditations opens with Marcus thanking the people in his life for mildness of temper, for being both resolute and yielding, for teaching him to be loved. That's not the résumé of a man trying to feel nothing.
Seneca goes further. Writing to his friend Lucilius after the death of their mutual friend Flaccus, in Letter 63, he admits: "I must be included among the examples of men who have been overcome by grief." One of Rome's most famous Stoics, on record as having wept. And in Discourses 2.10, Epictetus makes the trade explicit: lose your gentleness, become "a wild beast, a mischievous, treacherous, biting animal," and you haven't gained strength, you've lost your humanity. Stoicism was never about becoming emotionless; it's about not being ruled by emotion, which is a different project entirely.
Andreia: courage without gender
The Greek word for courage, andreia, shares a root with aner, "adult male," and it's one of the four cardinal Stoic virtues alongside wisdom, justice, and temperance. You'd expect the Stoics to claim courage as a male trait. They did the opposite. Cleanthes, Zeno's successor as head of the Stoic school, wrote an entire treatise titled On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in Man and Woman. The text itself is lost, but the title alone settles the question. Musonius Rufus, the Roman Stoic who taught Epictetus, went further still in Lecture IV, arguing, in Cora Lutz's translation: "There is not one set of virtues for a man and another for a woman... the same type of training and education must of necessity befit both men and women."
Four ways to test it yourself
Name what you feel. UCLA researcher Matthew Lieberman found that putting a label on an emotion, what he calls affect labelling, reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat-processing centre. It's what Marcus was doing every night in his journal.
Strength is measured by what you don't do. Seneca wrote a full book on this, De Ira, arguing that anger isn't a display of power but a form of temporary madness masquerading as one. See his fuller case in Seneca's techniques for letting go of anger.
Be the kind of man people can tell the truth to. If everyone around you has to manage your reactions before they say anything real, that's not strength, whatever the aesthetic suggests.
Widen the circle. The Stoic philosopher Hierocles described concentric rings of concern: yourself, then family, then friends, then community, then all of humanity, with the ethical work being to draw the outer rings inward. The broicism reading shrinks everything to the innermost ring. The Stoics spent their whole project trying to expand it.
Sources: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.18 and Book One (Gregory Hays translation); Seneca, Letters 63; Epictetus, Discourses 2.10; Musonius Rufus, Lecture IV (Cora Lutz translation); Cleanthes, On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in Man and Woman (title preserved, text lost).
Full transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
You may have heard of Marcus Aurelius, he's the face of thousands of TikTok videos, and he wrote in his private journal that gentleness is more manly than rage. That's not my reframe, that's all him. For the last few years a certain version of stoic masculinity has taken over the internet. Cold eyes, marble busts, quotes about controlling your emotions, and many young men have looked at this and thought, this is what this philosophy is for. It isn't.
I've spent the better part of 20 years looking and testing at different operating systems for being a man, whether that's meditation, Buddhism, plant medicine, martial arts, self-improvement in general, reading, travel, therapy. The whole spread. And throughout all of this experimentation, Stoicism is the philosophy of life that I keep coming back to. Not the version that promotes this very specific kind of control-your-emotions masculinity, but the actual Stoicism found in the ancient texts. In this video, I want to explain to you why it's so important and how Stoicism can provide us with the operating manual for being a man.
Let me describe a type of video you might have already seen. Black and white, AI voiceover, captions on screen, and very muscular, jacked Stoics with grain effects, glitch effects, flashy editing zooms, and quotes like "real men feel nothing" and "emotions are for the weak." This is what most people now mean when they say stoic. It's a whole aesthetic. One philosopher who's tracked it, Massimo Pigliucci, has a name for it. He calls it broicism, an attempt to hijack the language of Stoic philosophy to sell young men a version of manhood built on emotional suppression, dominance, and being untouchable.
And look, I don't think most people watching those videos are in bad faith. A lot of them are lonely, and the numbers on this are pretty grim. Fifteen percent of men in the US now say they have no close friends. That's a fivefold increase since 1990. The Surgeon General has called male loneliness a public health crisis, and every serious report on young men's mental health in the last few years tells the same story: record rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking, especially in men under 25. There's a real crisis, and you can see it on Netflix, some big hits have been the series Adolescence and Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere. What these works are talking about is real.
So naturally, young men are looking for answers. They're struggling. And when they see on the internet this version of Stoicism or philosophy that promises lots of control and lots of strength, they want to click. I would have probably clicked if I was 18. The problem is what they're clicking on isn't the philosophy. It's a cartoon version of the philosophy. And let me be clear about what the ancient Stoics said themselves: they were completely against this version of Stoicism. They weren't subtle about it. They explicitly warned against this, and I'll give you some actual quotes now.
If you've absorbed Meditations through Instagram, you've probably got an impression of Marcus Aurelius as someone with an ironclad mindset, unshakable, unstoppable, a man who trained himself out of feeling emotions. But if you actually read the Meditations, which was a private journal never meant to be published, you'll see that a lot of it is quite tender and soft. In Book 11 of the Meditations, passage 18, Marcus is making a note to himself about what to do if he starts to feel an angry rage coming on. This is what he says, in Gregory Hays' translation: "Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on. It isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human and therefore manlier." That's pretty profound, right? Gentleness is manlier than rage. And this is coming from the man who is the archetype of the warrior king, stone-faced iron emperor, the hero of the broicism movement.
And this isn't a one-off. If you look at Book One, the very beginning of Meditations, Marcus spends time thanking all of the people who have helped him in his life, showing deep gratitude for what they taught him. From his adoptive father, the Emperor Antoninus Pius, mildness of temper. From his Stoic tutor Apollonius of Chalcedon, that the same man can be both most resolute and yielding. From the man he calls his brother, Severus, to believe that he is loved by his friends. He thanks his mother for moral education, and he thanks people for kindness, listening, willingness to be loved, compassion and tolerance. This is all in Book One of the Meditations, where Marcus is recording everything he thinks makes a good man. The stone-faced emperor is a Hollywood fiction. The real man, Marcus Aurelius, opened Book One by thanking the people who shaped him.
Next, Seneca, who destroys the whole "men don't cry" version of Stoicism in about two sentences. In Letter 63, Seneca is writing to his friend Lucilius over the death of Lucilius' friend Flaccus. He's trying to console him. Whereas the broicism version is "don't feel anything at all, shove those emotions down," Seneca is talking about regulation. The broicism movement talks about suppression. Very different things. And because Seneca is quite honest, he says something to Lucilius that many people wouldn't quote him as saying. Seneca had lost one of his best friends, and he was consumed by grief himself. He says, "I must be included among the examples of men who have been overcome by grief." Possibly the most famous Stoic of the Roman world, admitting he was overcome by grief, weeping and sobbing and really feeling the pain.
This is the man the internet wants you to believe had complete emotional equanimity in all situations, above it all, able to suppress all emotion. In the bro version of Stoicism, it's all about becoming colder, harder, tougher, more aggressive. But Epictetus actually says that if you become more aggressive, you don't gain manhood, you just lose your humanity. In Discourses Book 2, Chapter 10, Epictetus talks about being a man. He says: "If instead of being a man, a gentle and social being, you have become a wild beast, a mischievous, treacherous, biting animal, have you lost nothing?" For Epictetus, the base starting point of being a good human is to be gentle, polite, and social. If you downgrade to a wild animal, you've lost something. This is the opposite of the alpha-animal framing. For Epictetus, going animal is a failure. Becoming more human is harder, rarer, and the thing to do.
Fourth, and this one might be the most interesting: a word. The word for courage, andreia. This word is translated as manliness. It comes from aner, which means adult male, and has the same root as the word android. So andreia, or courage, is one of the four cardinal virtues alongside temperance, wisdom, and justice. This raises a question: if courage is translated as manliness, would the Stoics then say that part of virtue is a man thing? Here's where it gets good. No, they did the opposite. Zeno's successor as head of the Stoic school, a man called Cleanthes, wrote an entire treatise titled, and this is the actual title preserved in the ancient records, On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in Man and Woman. The treatise itself is lost. All we have is the title, which on its own tells you exactly where Stoicism stood on this.
Musonius Rufus, the Roman Stoic who taught Epictetus, went further. He wrote a lecture called Should Daughters Receive the Same Education as Sons? Remember, this is first-century Rome. Here's what he says, in Cora Lutz's translation: "There is not one set of virtues for a man and another for a woman. If then men and women are born with the same virtues, the same type of training and education must of necessity befit both men and women." So the Stoics took the word andreia, which means manliness, and made it universal. They claimed that courage is a form of knowledge, and that knowledge can be known by all humans alike. So if anyone tells you to "man up" and uses a Stoic quote to justify it, the ancient Stoics themselves would be shaking their heads, saying no, courage is for everyone.
So what does this actually look like in practice? Philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, is pretty pointless if it just stays in the realm of theory. So here are four ideas, guiding principles, that you can use to test if you're actually living this way of being a man, according to the ancient Stoics.
One, you can name what you feel. This doesn't mean suppressing it or broadcasting it, just naming it. Research done by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA found that if you can add a label to the emotion you feel, you get reduced activity in the amygdala. This is called affect labelling. The amygdala is linked to threat processing. The Stoics were doing this type of affect labelling thousands of years ago. That is what the Meditations is: you notice an impression, a thought, an impulse, and then you write about it, journal it, make a note, and try to process it and make the best judgment moving forwards. If you try to suppress it, all you're doing is delaying it, and it's going to come out in a messy, sideways fashion.
Two, your strength is measured by what you don't do. Anyone can retaliate, anyone can snap back, anyone can lose their cool. But it's actually more powerful and more manly to be able to reply and choose not to. Seneca has a whole book on anger called De Ira, and his argument is that anger is not a display of strength, it's a loss of control masquerading as power. Seneca calls anger, in De Ira, a form of temporary madness or brief insanity. It's not a form of power. In fact, if you look at children and toddlers, they get angry the minute they don't get their own way. So when adults exhibit this behaviour, they are essentially irrational children in adult bodies.
Three, you are the kind of man that people can tell the truth to. This is quite hard, right? If you're the kind of person that your partner, your kids, your family, your friends try talking to and you immediately jump in to fix it or give advice or make it about you, that's not really strength. The Stoic ideal for a man isn't the kind of person that no one needs, it's the kind of person that people will happily come to, to share and to be validated and to talk to. If you look at Seneca's letters to Lucilius, there's a lot of warmth and love beneath the advice he's giving.
Four, you widen the circle. The philosopher Hierocles drew these concentric rings. He put us at the centre, and then there's our family, our friends, our acquaintances, strangers, people in different countries, and on and on. And these rings get wider and wider. He said the goal of an ethical life is to draw these outer rings toward ourselves. The broicism version of Stoicism cuts these outer rings off and makes it all about the central inner circle, you. Our goal is ultimately to become more connected and more social, and to use our skills and our talents and our reason to better society and to create a better world for us all to live in.
Here's the hard truth beneath all of this. The version of Stoicism the internet has been peddling is something the Stoics themselves had a word for: pathe. This just means destructive emotions. For the Stoics, pathe was a form of slavery. Fear dressed up as control, loneliness dressed up as freedom, pride dressed up as discipline. And Stoicism had an escape route from pathe. It wasn't about becoming unfeeling, but about giving you a playbook, a few guiding principles, an operating manual for becoming more human in a world that's constantly trying to make you less and constantly putting obstacles in front of you.
We've seen that Marcus Aurelius, who, by the way, was a trained fighter with armies at his disposal, thought that gentleness is more manly than rage. Seneca gave himself permission to weep. Epictetus said that if we become a type of biting animal, we lose something. The goal is not to become someone made of stone, unfeeling, suppressed, untouchable. It's much simpler than that: to become someone worth being, to live a life well lived.
If this topic interests you and you'd like to learn more about the Stoic counters to the big claims in the manosphere movement, I've made a video called The High Value Man Is Actually a Slave, covering the five main claims of the manosphere and what the Stoics would say in response. I appreciate you watching this to the end instead of bailing after the first minute, and I hope these ideas provide better guidance than some of what's floating around the internet. I'll see you in the next one.
Go deeper
If you want structured practice, the 7-Day Stoic Challenge is free. Nine audio lessons and a 42-page workbook.