Self-help gets philosophical
77 comments
·November 1, 2025maCDzP
cjbgkagh
Accepting the things that you cannot change does not mean assume you cannot change things then accept it. It’s predicated on an accurate assessment of what you can and cannot change. In my view such acceptance is for optimizing application of effort by not wasting effort on things that actually cannot be changed. “Don’t go tilting at windmills”
scruple
The Serenity Prayer has been around for about 100 years now. I find myself repeating it fairly often, especially now that I've got young children.
Spivak
This prayer bothers me because it punts the "hard part" to the Lord when it doesn't need to. The exact same sentiment which has been rediscovered over and over for at least 2000 years and is far more actionable is, "you can't control others*, you can only control your response to them."
It gives you a blueprint of what kinds of things you can expect to be able to change and the limitations you'll face in the attempt.
* Which more in the context of the 12 step program the other person can be yourself. You will have thoughts, impulses, emotions, urges that you can't control but you can control your reaction to them.
digianarchist
A good point is made at the end of the article:
> But preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them.
Stoicism doesn't answer the question "what can and can't we control" and doesn't claim to. I think the modern neostoicism trend is to make the reader believe that they have little control over daily life, encouraging an almost narcissistic-nihilist response to ongoing events.
FloorEgg
That doesn't sound like stoicism to me.
At its core stoicism is about having the best possible judgement and taking the best possible actions. Sometimes acting makes a situation worse and so patience or restraint are what's best. It seems you've confused this situational wisdom with a universal principle.
Everything I've learned about stoicism has taught me to not waste energy on things I can't control so that I can spend it on making my life and the lives of people I care about continuously better.
an0malous
This is why the OP calls pop-Stoicism vacuous. It isn't really helpful to know you should always take the best action, or not waste energy on things you can't control. The challenge is knowing what the best action is, or what is or isn't in your control.
diego_sandoval
> In retrospect I should have focused on changing my situation in stead of learning to live with it.
Stoicism doesn't tell you to just learn to live with things that you can change. That's only for things that you cannot change.
forgetfulness
Does it give you tools to change what you can change, though?
I’ll be reading “Meditations” soon enough, but emphasis on the means to accept things you are helpless about, and not the opposite, can lead to learned helplessness.
If young people take up on these ideas, they just can’t know better at their stage in life, one where they can be, for the most part, helpless.
FredPret
I always thought that instead of learning to meditate in the snow and brave the cold, or learning to be zen despite a punishing heatwave, is helpful but still greatly inferior to inventing fur jackets, insulation, heating, and air conditioning.
One needs mental toughness. However it's better to solve problems for good and then have a higher technology base for the next generation to build on.
grey-area
You will never have as much power as Aurelius.
Why was he nevertheless a stoic?
Isamu
He studied the greek classics with a mentor before he became Emperor. His Meditations reflect his study. He didn’t want to become Emperor because he viewed it as a life of strict duty and tasks that he didn’t want to do, like going on military campaigns.
layer8
Stoicism doesn’t mean accepting one’s situation as unchangeable.
embedding-shape
What about "no single mindset works all the time" instead? Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and just learn to live with something, sometimes you need not to, and instead fight until you can't, to get out of the situation. Different moments call for different ways of seeing situations, and maybe learning to identify what moment calls for what mindset is something we need to focus on more, rather than digging into one position that should always work.
portaouflop
Ideology belongs in the trash.
But yea you can pick and choose parts of some ideologies as they are useful in the moment.
jahsome
Not to split hairs but isn't the phrase "ideology belongs in the trash" itself somewhat ideological?
api
“All models are wrong but some models are useful.”
wcfrobert
Reminds me of that one scene in Equalizer. It's cheesy and I will never admit to liking the movie in real life. But it's one of those scenes that's really stuck with me over the years.
Robert: "I think you can be anything you want to be."
Teri: "Maybe in your World, Robert. Doesn't really happen that way in mine."
Robert: "Change your world."
robot-wrangler
> the idea that nothing matters has gained significant purchase
An example of an increasingly popular trend that conflates what I'd call "value nihilism" with "action/effort nihilism". There's a huge difference. Value-nihilism is kind of soul-sickness that's probably super rare in the general population and usually comorbid with stuff like dark triad or clinical depression. Action/effort nihilism, or the POV that nothing can be done to improve things, is just realism or pragmatism in a party mask.
Value-nihilism cannot be disproved or even argued with, because there's no place to stand. On the bright side(?), action/effort nihilism is a pretty simple thing to cure if you're in a leadership position. Reward effort, intentions, results, and keep the promises you make so that people can plan for their future and have agency. Stop playing corrupt and counterproductive games with politics, optics, nepotism
djoldman
Great comment.
I think the trump quote is more value-nihilist:
> "You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”
sifar
I think people stop at nothing matters or there is no meaning. So either one can be depressed about it or if one takes a step further, if nothing matters/things don't have a meaning, great, then I can focus on stuff that matters to me, gives meaning to me and people around me at large.
twodave
I believe an answer to this is just temperance. Finding balance can be difficult if you have lost it for a long time, but in general not letting things outside your ability to influence impact your overall psyche is a healthy choice. How do I know if something is out of balance in my life? Usually I know this because it’s negatively affecting how I treat others or dominating all of my conversations. Hysteria doesn’t actually solve anything, and in fact it will usually cause problems of its own.
zkmon
Books are same as TV shows - more about sounding weird to catch the fish (audience). I don't read any of those self-help books or seemingly philosophical notes.
The Western world has invented too much of self-awareness and social reflection. People smile too much, smile at strangers, worry about social acceptance, worry about self, go crazy about all thing cosmetic in life and at work.
You don't need to think too much about anything or have too much of self-awareness. Just be real, with neutral expression, relaxed, not emotional etc.
The worst thing is having happiness as a goal. It should be a side-effect, not a goal. Infact, you shouldn't have any goals. Any incremental achievement is nice to have, and down-side is business as usual. Just deal with it.
You get angry or emotional because reality is too different from your expectations. That's the fault of your expectations, not of reality.
null
HEmanZ
“ People smile too much, smile at strangers…”
How dare they.
unpopularopp
If you are american you'll probably never notice how off-putting is the american niceness. And it's not natural if you ever traveled and seen the world a little bit.
billforsternz
I disagree. I'm not American but I've travelled extensively around the world and in America. Niceness is widespread, it's not a particularly American thing. And it's always appreciated and positive, the alternative is miserable.
AaronAPU
Cool, stay in your other country and I’ll keep smiling with my fellow Americans.
toomanyrichies
Genuine question as an American- why would niceness be off-putting? What would you prefer? I'm guessing neutrality or formality, as opposed to outright rudeness... is it because it feels too familiar, and a bit of arms-length distance is more your custom?
Again, genuinely curious as an outsider.
HEmanZ
I’ve travelled and lived abroad extensively and I’d say American niceness goes over well in 90% of the world. And where it doesn’t, boo hoo, they can handle a smile.
mikestew
Man, are you going to hate Canadians.
lawn
Being nice is natural at least in the Nordics, across Europe, Japan and other Asian countries.
Where is being nice unnatural? Russia?
digianarchist
I have a particular disdain for the profanity-laden slop that is works penned by Mark Manson. He's not alone as most "self-help" books are trash reads that only serve as some form of cathartic release to their readers.
That's not to say all books in the genre are useless. I have recommended Cal Newport's works before but they very much suffer from "this 300 page book could have been a blog post" levels of verbosity.
zkmon
The need to sell, forces one to be as weird and vulgar as possible. Most books are selling focused. Selling has spoiled many art forms. The extreme antics you see on stage for a music show has nothing to do with music either.
api
A huge amount of nonfiction work is overlong. Many nonfiction works could be condensed to an essay or even just a blurb.
ArcHound
This article is a soup of concepts. And the worst part: most of them are not contradictory at all.
Nothing matters as in there is no purpose given to us from above is true (at least according to Nietzsche). That means we have the option of inventing our own purpose. Or not - it's still good to enjoy life as is.
I've read hope is fucked some long time ago. It touches the stoicism with: don't get too invested in things outside of your control, it's not good for you. Yes, but Mark forgets that living like this is not pleasant at all. But having the skill of acceptance is good as we're not omnipotent, so there are things we can't do anything about.
That brings me to manifesting (ugh). We all know we won't get everything by wishing hard. It's still good to try and by thinking about positive result we have better probability of figuring out a plan and sustaining motivation to see the plan through.
Next we move on to terrible people listening to philosophy. Yes, they can do that and it doesn't take away from the teachings. And no, e.g. stoicism has a strong moral component which they are purposefully ignoring.
Also, to respond to title directly: accepting your life is shitty and understanding it doesn't take away from your character doesn't mean not trying to improve your situation. Yes, it means feeling good if your attempts fail. You still have the option of trying again.
I give the article author massive props for being honest with themselves. But no, books cannot save you. Only you perhaps can, but you might fail. And that's ok.
To end positively, I agree with the call to action. And the article is a nice historical overview.
breve
> The anesthetizing pleasures of disengagement seem especially seductive these days
Authoritarians always want you to embrace a nihilistic apathy. It makes you easier to rule and guarantees their continued power without challenge.
It's what happened to Russia. And now we see the Russification of America.
cantor_S_drug
> When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy — but doing so is tragic when they include stopping a genocide or ending homelessness.
I don't understand such analysis when there are opposing "blob" forces trying to push the world into worse state. Forget about people dying in earthquakes, consider current wars, we are using resources (human, capital, tech) to destroy resources (uprooting human lives, destroying buildings, blowing up infrastructure) while those very resources could be used to create more resources which solve problems and create wealth. World is not a closed system, there are forces operating which for whatever reasons are not aligned for humanity's flourishing.
rayiner
That’s backwards. Our fight isn’t against “blob forces, but instead against human nature and regression to the mean. My dad’s village in Bangladesh is the default state of humanity. The life you have in San Francisco or wherever is a bubble of order and flourishing in a hostile world, like the inside of a single cell organism.
walleeee
The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless.
Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
rayiner
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south"
San Francisco is not rich because Bangladesh is poor. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous. I’m stuck in America because my parents and grandparents in Bangladesh were infected by such stupid thinking. Other people in the “global south” that rejected such victimhood leapt ahead. When we came to America in 1989, China’s per-capita GDP was a little higher than Bangladesh, but a little lower than India. Since then, China has become a livable place, while Bangladesh and India remain impoverished. Your mindset is a roadmap for the global south to remain poor and backward.
api
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else"
This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed.
This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years.
Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology.
It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.
MangoToupe
What's the difference? Surely this is worth fighting in both instances.
Also I struggle to see San Francisco as "flourishing" so much as "the very hostility choking the world out for no particular reason".
iJohnDoe
The Bush/Cheney wars were peak evil of modern times of sending our children off to die just to make Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton rich. Bush and Cheney should be considered mass murders. Not to mention your point about all the funds that could have been spent elsewhere.
astrange
Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War. The US is an oil exporter and doesn't have any oil contracts in Iraq. In fact, no one makes money from any wars, and defense contractors profit less during wartime than peacetime.
One universal principle about US politics is that many people try to sound savvy by claiming X thing is obviously about the money, or that some secret evil competent person did something and successfully profited from it, and then if you look their explanation is always wrong. In fact there are no competent evil people and bad ideas are simply just bad for everyone.
…Also, Bush's PEPFAR program was so good that I think he's clearly saved more lives than any other president even if you count the wars against him.
kamranjon
“Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War.”
This seems wrong?
Halliburton secured a 7billion dollar contract where they were the only allowed bidders, their subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root (KBR) was estimated to receive at least 39.5billion dollars in federal contracts.
Halliburton experienced a 80% increase in revenue by the first quarter of 2004…
Most of these contracts were “cost-plus” which meant they were guaranteed reimbursement for their costs + a guaranteed profit on top of that.
As a result of the war many oil companies including BP were awarded access and development contracts to the oil fields, with BP extracting well over 15billion dollars worth of oil.
Over 150billion dollars in oil money apparently just went missing or was “stolen”.
Also the US has maintained control over Iraqi oil revenue since the beginning of the war in 2003.
It would seem to be almost rewriting history to make such a statement…
add-sub-mul-div
Yes, Erik Prince famously donated his company's time during that era.
raw_anon_1111
This is not an unpopular opinion. No one on the right or left defends the second Iraq War anymore and few defend the war in Afghanistan.
pluto_modadic
IIRC stoicism was written by rich people (and advisors to rich people) who didn't focus at all on improving the system. It's on-brand for the self-help influencer phenomena where you disregard disadvantages to others and systemic problems.
bigstrat2003
Bro one of the most prominent Stoic writers was a literal slave. This idea that it's a philosophy only for the rich and powerful couldn't be further from the truth.
silexia
Every biology textbook I've ever read tells us the purpose of life in plain black and white: to reproduce. If you have children, especially a lot of children, you will see the purpose of life.
blfr
While I get the surprising modernness of Aurelius' writing, I don't get the fascination with him since he ultimately failed at his most important task: choosing a reliable heir. Maybe he should have cared more and be more attached. Maybe the lesson here is that leaders should actually be engaged. Caesar may have committed a genocide and caused a civil war but he hit his KPIs with the state of Rome and Octavian.
Meanwhile Trump's "You do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter" is a tremendous insight for someone in a relatable position. A production system is down, some deal is falling apart, company going bankrupt, someone clowned on you live on tv? These matter but we're not in the ER here, no one's dying, and certainly not 400k people, keep perspective.
renewiltord
Life’s pretty good, guys. It’s been good when I was a little child playing in the mud. It was good when I was on my one hour ride to school. It was good when I first cut my flesh to the bone and watched my dad sew it up. It was good when a girl I had a crush on didn’t feel that way about me.
It was good when I nearly failed Algebraic Geometry because I didn’t have what it took. It was good when I almost didn’t get an internship out of uni because I procrastinated till Jan of the year. It was good when I moved to SF with $25 in my bank account.
It was good when I lived on a couch off Air Bed And Breakfast. It was good when a car hit me on my motorcycle. It was good when I was robbed.
Life is just good. Because the alternative is oblivion.
IvanLudvig
life is good. without it, you'd be dead
Noumenon72
It's nice of evolution to imbue some people with these false views. I hope your kids inherit the earth so people with more realistic outlooks don't have to be born and suffer through it.
the_cat_kittles
[flagged]
I used to think stoicism was great. But now I think that it’s not so great. In retrospect I should have focused on changing my situation in stead of learning to live with it. Compared to Aurelius - I am not living around 0 bc - in today’s world I can change a lot of things.