You’ve always liked philosophy. In another life you would’ve attended it at university, if you didn’t go for a “safer path”. So you keep that passion alive by reading books and stuff on your own. How much you understand of all of that is another topic, but hey, you’re happy with it.

Then, sometimes, you find one of these books in the self-help section at the airport: it’s about “philosophy”, it’s supposed to improve your live before you even finish the introduction and everyone online is raving about it. That already sends alarms to your bullshit-detector, but you decide to see what all the craze is about.

So you buy one copy of Discipline Is Destiny by Ryan Holiday and you start reading. You get to page 19. Then you read this:

“[Eisenhower’s] greatness, like all true greatness, was not rooted in aggression or ego or his appetites or a vast fortune, but in simplicity and restraint — in how he commanded himself, which in turn made him worthy of commanding others. Contrast him with the conquerors of his time: Hitler. Mussolini. Stalin. Contrast him even with his contemporaries: MacArthur. Patton. Montgomery. Contrast him with his peers of the past: Alexander the Great. Xerxes. Napoleon. In the end, what endures, what we truly marvel at, is not the ambition but the self-mastery. The self-awareness. The temperance.”

You read it again. One, two, three times. What the fuck is this guy talking about? Is this supposed to be some kind of comparison? This is just a list of names, with some clear goodies and baddies, and the further back in history he goes, the crazier it gets.

Then there’s the conclusion: “what endures, what we truly marvel at, is not the ambition but the self-mastery.” Wait, are you sure that’s how it works? Napoleon and Alexander the Great are stuff of legend, Eisenhower isn’t.

Of course nobody marvels at Napoleon for his restraint (he’s remembered for his ego, his strategic mastery, and his failure in Russia mainly) but, if anything, that proves exactly the opposite argument Holiday wanted to make. What endures, is not the self-mastery but the ambition. We can then discuss if that’s right or wrong, but that’s just the reality of things.

And I mean, who would ever seriously argue that Eisenhower had more discipline than Xerxes? Is that a serious comparison? How can you read this with a straight face?

Stoicism has been heavily co-opted by the likes of Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferris, making it an ancient-wisdom kind of solution for modern problems. And obviously this has been framed in the optics of capitalism, productivity, and egoism.

The stoics themselves were quite the hypocrites. Look at Seneca, praising indifference to wealth while being one of the richest men of Rome and a loan-shark. One could even argue that their teaching must have some problems if Marco Aurelio’s son is fucking Commodus and Seneca tutored (and enabled) Nero.

Stoicism had the luck of being favoured by Christians, as opposed to Epicureanism, for example. Natural law and cosmic order translate nicely into Christian doctrine. A universe with no providence and no afterlife doesn’t, so the Church Fathers kept copying out Seneca and let Epicurus rot. Dante even parks the Epicureans in Hell for denying the soul survives.

So, if anything, try to be more of an Epicurean:

• Pleasure isn’t indulgence, it’s the absence of pain and anxiety
• Cut unnecessary desires instead of disciplining yourself into tolerating them.
• Friendship over ambition. Epicurus built a garden with his friends, not an empire.
• Live unnoticed. You don’t need a personal brand to have a good life.
• Don’t outsource your happiness to fame or legacy. Epicurus didn’t found a movement to be remembered, he founded a garden to actually live in.

Anyway, I abandoned the book at page 19. Life is too short for this shit.