Stoicism is a strange philosophy. At its core, there’s a belief that only the directly controllable aspects of life should have an impact on your psyche.
However, the real world doesn’t make distinctions based on whether you can directly control an outcome. Gas prices don’t stay put for you when war is declared; loved ones don’t give you a heads up before passing away, and your mental state doesn’t come equipped with a state-of-the-art on and off switch.
Yet stoicism is a dominant philosophy in the present day — or rather, a distorted and glorified version of it.
In a world filled with more externalities than ever before, more things to worry about that have direct influence on our well-being, stoicism is presented as a great escape.
Although modern attempts at a stoic lifestyle keep the original goals of preserving a steady state of mind and keeping one’s life on track, they diverge from their ancient precedent in a keenly 21st-century way — by promising pleasure and wealth as a result of an unfettered way of life. You only have to look at the past couple of years to see how pervasive it is in our cultural scene.
David Goggins, a former Navy SEAL who has built a brand on neo-stoic philosophies such as embracing pain and “callusing the brain,” has made millions by selling merchandise, writing books and creating motivational content.
His idea is that if you can endure any form of hardship, nothing can stop you on your path to success. This simplified version of a robust tradition of philosophy operates like Ozempic while making you believe that you’re spending hours at the gym.
We have glorified being so overly stoic that we don’t value the uncontrollable aspects of life. Even worse, public figures are playing into this stoic mindset to justify lowering their responsibilities.
Most notably, Donald Trump skipped critical negotiation meetings about the war in Iran to attend a UFC pay-per-view event where the announcers praised and spotlighted his appearance.
This showing implicitly tells us one thing: Trump doesn’t believe that he can, will or should make a difference in global talks with Iran.
So, he plays into the stoic philosophy of negating what isn’t directly controllable by enjoying his time at an MMA fight rather than focusing on an unwavering threat. Frankly, it’s pathetic.
The president of the U.S. can disregard the largest threat to American life by being a good little stoic. The issue is that he can influence these talks — and he knows it.
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Trump’s pop stoicism is not accidental; it is a finely tuned electoral instrument.
The language of toughness, self-reliance and emotional detachment didn’t organically bubble up from his base; it was cultivated, refined and strategically mirrored back to them by a political figure who recognized its appeal.
When Trump performs indifference to criticism, shrugs off scandal and frames every adversity as something he simply powered through, he isn’t just expressing a personality. He’s selling an identity to voters who want to believe they’re also built differently.
The implicit message is, “I don’t flinch, and neither should you.”
Flattering the listener at the exact moment they feel most vulnerable, it’s a deeply effective political maneuver.
It tells them their struggles aren’t the consequences of policy failures or decisions made behind closed doors, but rather tests of personal character only the weak fail.
You aren’t economically squeezed because of decades of wage stagnation and eroding labor protections — you’re being tested. You aren’t drowning in medical debt because of a structurally broken healthcare system — you just need to toughen up and figure it out.
The philosophy conveniently relocates the source of suffering from the external to the internal and, in doing so, quietly absolves the people with the most power to change those conditions.
What makes this especially cynical is that Trump applies the philosophy selectively.
He projects stoic invulnerability when it is politically useful: when facing legal indictments, when dismissing unfavorable press and when performing unconcern at a UFC event while Iran negotiations hang in the balance.
But the moment a vote is needed, the suffering of his base becomes very real, very urgent and entirely the fault of external enemies like immigrants, globalists and the deep state.
The stoic mask slips just long enough to channel grievance into turnout, then it snaps back into place. It is not a philosophy; it is a costume.
And it works because pop stoicism has already done the groundwork.
Years of Goggins clips, hustle-culture content and “no excuses” rhetoric have primed most voters to distrust vulnerability, consider asking for help a weakness and admire the person who simply endures.
Trump didn’t create that audience; he inherited it and instinctively understood how to speak its language.
In that sense, the UFC appearance wasn’t a lapse in judgment. It was a perfectly legible signal to a base taught to read detachment as strength and strength as the only trait worth following.
This is the quiet rot at the center of pop stoicism’s political life.
When an ordinary citizen detaches from outcomes they can’t control, it’s a personal lapse in engagement at worst. But when the most powerful executive in the world does it, detachment becomes dereliction.
The original Stoics never confused equanimity with abdication. Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote “Meditations” while commanding armies and presiding over a plague-ridden empire.
He did not retreat from the weight of consequence; he wrote to steel himself for it. The point was never to shrink from what you could affect — it was to stop torturing yourself over what you genuinely could not.
That distinction, razor-thin on paper, is everything in practice.
What modern stoicism sells — and what its political inheritors have perfected — is the erasure of that distinction entirely.
If the rhetoric of personal responsibility is deployed loudly enough, if the mythology of the self-made, unshakeable individual is sufficiently celebrated, then the powerful can abdicate their obligations under a philosophical veneer that sounds almost noble.
It isn’t. It is the oldest trick in the book: disguising inaction as wisdom.
The antidote is not to abandon stoic practice altogether.
There is real and lasting value in learning to carry grief without being destroyed by it, in distinguishing between anxiety that motivates and anxiety that paralyzes and in refusing to let the noise of the uncontrollable displace deliberate action.
But that practice must be paired with a clear-eyed account of where one’s reach actually ends.
For most of us, that boundary is closer than we’d like. For a sitting president negotiating on the edge of war, it is very, very far away.
A stoicism honest enough to admit as such would be worth having. The version currently on sale is not.
Contact Sasha Morel at [email protected]. Follow him on X @BySashaMorel.
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Sasha Morel is a sophomore at the University of Florida studying Politics, Philosophy, Economics, and Law, as well as Anthropology. His returning column focuses on policy analysis surrounding domestic, global, and local politics, with a focus on targeting root causes of common issues and highlighting unrepresented perspectives. Outside of the Alligator, Sasha is a nationally recognized debate coach for high schoolers across the US.