What Is Stoicism?
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Alot of good answers here, but not all are real ELI5.
I am a sub to r/Stoicism, and practice it as much as I am able.
This is what I tell my kids (specifically, the seven year old little girl we are adopting).
“You cannot control what your brother does. So do not worry about what he thinks, about he may say or do. If he is going to do something bad, it is for him to get in trouble, not you.
“If he does something to you, if he makes you get mad, you need to stop and think. You are going to get mad all the time, but you can’t hit everyone who gets you mad. **You** are in control, not the mad. It doesn’t matter how angry you get, don’t let the anger make you do something you will regret. You need to think.
“If you don’t, both of you will be in trouble.”
To rephrase at slightly above ELI7, Stoicism is a philosophy about living a life where you ensure that your thinking mind is always in control; where you know about what you can and cannot control, and do not worry about what you cannot control, but instead deal with what you can. And, most importantly – and challenging – not allowing ones emotions to control ones actions.
I can control this so I work to make it better vs I can’t control this so I will just leave it be and hopefully come up with something later and even if I don’t it’s no skin off my back to have at least thought of it
That’s the way I see stoicism
The real Eli5 here is that stoicism is essentially resilience to bullshit you can’t affect
It’s being okay with the fact the world is random
A long time ago, a guy in Greece (shows you where Greece is on the map, because you’re 5 y.o.) had too much time to think, so he thought up a new set of rules for looking at life. This is called a philosophy. He didn’t just make this up out of thin air though, because he had another philosophy to draw inspiration from at the time, called Cynicism.
In Cynicism, you’re taught to expect the worst, so you’ll never be unhappy. Stoicism tweaked this and teaches to accept that things happen regardless of how you feel about them. Therefore, it makes sense to not let your feelings get out of control and affect the way you think, because that might cause you to do silly things.
Unfortunately in modern times people have reduced this teaching to mean; “be emotionless, indifferent, or apathetic”. There is a lot more to Stoicism than that.
Stoicism: if you feel mad or bad or sad, don’t get wrapped up in those feelings. Keep some distance between yourself and your emotions.
Same thing if you feel happy, glad, or rad. Don’t get too attached to those feelings, either.
Instead, focus on what’s important to you and understand that emotions should not guide you – they are just signs that you can use to figure out what’s going on inside of you.
To my mind, it’s the idea that you try to avoid having excessive emotional reactions to people or situations that you encounter in your life, especially if you don’t have control over them.
Think about what is happening and try to respond in a logical, useful, caring way.
I believe it’s a philosophy from the Ancient Greek era that preaches ideas along the lines of ‘don’t concern yourself with what you cannot control’ and that you are in control of how you react, your emotions etc.
Stoicism is a classical philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium back in 300BCE. It asserts that the practice of virtue is both necessary and sufficient to achieve eudaimonia (one of my favorite SAT words), meaning a life well lived. This uses the Aristotelian definition of virtue.
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