What Is Stoicism? Derren Brown on the Philosophy Behind the Meditations

Stoicism is having a moment. It has been adopted by Silicon Valley executives, military commanders, professional athletes, and self-help authors who quote Marcus Aurelius on Instagram. Most of these uses have something to do with resilience and control. Very few have much to do with what Stoicism actually argued. The actual argument is narrow and demanding: the only things within your control are your thoughts and your actions, and everything else (health, reputation, outcomes) should be met with disciplined indifference. Founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BC, Stoicism is a practice for troubled times, not a mindset for winners.

Derren Brown has been reading Stoic philosophy seriously for long enough to have written a book about it called Happy, published in 2016, which took three years and gave him both a deep appreciation for what Stoicism offers and a clear-eyed view of what it doesn’t. His Rebind commentary on The Meditations is, among other things, an unusually good short introduction to Stoicism, not because it is comprehensive, but because it is honest about what the philosophy is for and where it falls short.

The Origin and the Tradition

Stoicism was founded in Athens around 300 BC by Zeno of Citium, who taught in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, which gave the school its name. It became enormously popular in the Roman world, particularly among the educated middle and upper classes, and produced three writers whose work survives substantially: Seneca (a Roman playwright and statesman who died by Nero’s order), Epictetus (a freed slave who became the most influential Stoic teacher of the first century), and Marcus Aurelius (emperor of Rome).

The diversity of these three figures (the wealthy senator, the slave, the emperor) is itself part of the appeal of Stoicism: the philosophy does not depend on your circumstances. Its practice is available to whoever chooses it. “Stoicism was very popular amongst the Roman middle classes,” Brown notes, “and it was really about dealing with troubled times.” When Christianity spread through the empire, it was the Stoics they most needed to win over, which is why so much early Christian writing is in dialogue with Stoic ideas.

The Central Distinction

The spine of Stoic thought, the idea that organizes everything else, is the distinction between what is within our control and what isn’t. Epictetus states it plainly at the opening of the Enchiridion: some things are up to us and some things are not. Up to us: our judgments, intentions, desires, and aversions. Not up to us: our bodies, our reputations, what other people do, what happens to us.

Brown summarizes it this way: “The only things within our control, according to the Stoics, are our thoughts and our actions. So all of the efforts we should make in life are in those areas — in our intentions and what we do and how we behave, even how we think. What happens in the rest of the world, and what happens to us? Well, that’s all just a matter of judgment, and the stories we tell ourselves.”

This is not a counsel of passivity. The Stoics were extremely active in the world. Marcus fought wars, Seneca wrote prolifically and ran the Roman empire during Nero’s early years, Epictetus taught hundreds of students. The point is not to stop trying to affect the world but to understand clearly what is and isn’t within your power, and to direct your effort accordingly. Anxiety, in the Stoic view, almost always comes from trying to control things that cannot be controlled.

The Three Disciplines

The French philosopher Pierre Hadot, in his landmark study The Inner Citadel, identified three organizing disciplines in Marcus’s thought that Brown uses as his reading framework throughout the Rebind commentary. The discipline of desire asks what we should want. The Stoic answer is to desire what we actually have (our circumstances as they are, our fate as it is) rather than things we imagine would make us happy. This is not resignation but a recognition that the endless deferral of happiness onto future acquisitions is itself a form of suffering. “We should desire our lot in the world,” Brown says, “as opposed to constantly desiring things that we hanker after and then never really make us happy.”

The discipline of action asks how we should live with other people. Marcus returns to this constantly: we are, as he puts it, limbs of a greater body, with genuine obligations to each other. Service to others is not an imposition on the philosophical life but its expression. The good for a human being is bound up with the good for human beings.

The discipline of judgment, which Brown considers the most important, because it underpins the other two, asks how we form our assessments of events. The Stoics were struck by the degree to which suffering is produced not by events themselves but by the stories we construct around them. “The things that feel like pleasures and pains in the world that throw us into turmoil are really just the judgments that we’re making,” Brown says. “They’re narratives that we’re forming, stories we’re telling ourselves.” The practice is to notice the story and not to embellish it beyond what the event actually contains.

What It Is Not

Brown is precise about two common misreadings of Stoicism.

The first is the equation of Stoicism with emotional suppression, the stiff-upper-lip tradition that treats feeling nothing as an achievement. This is not what Marcus or Epictetus or Seneca argued. The Stoic practice is not to suppress emotion but to create a small degree of distance from it; Brown calls it the “one foot outside the feeling.” The emotion is real. The practice is observing it rather than being entirely absorbed by it. “If you’re having a feeling, you are not that feeling,” Brown says. “It’s something that you have.”

The second is the confusion of Stoicism with positive thinking. Modern self-help culture has absorbed some Stoic language, the emphasis on mindset, on what we can control, on not being derailed by circumstances, while reversing the central argument. Positive thinking promises that the right attitude will produce the right outcome. Stoicism makes no such promise. It simply asks you to do your best, to have high intention and low expectation, and to accept what comes. “Our modern approach to happiness is very much about thinking we can control our fates,” Brown says. “Unfortunately, none of that’s true.”

Why Marcus

Of the three major surviving Stoic writers, Marcus is in some ways the most difficult to read and in other ways the most valuable. Seneca is more polished and more rhetorically satisfying. Epictetus is clearer and more directly instructional. Marcus is neither polished nor clear. He is private, repetitive, and sometimes raw.

What Marcus offers that the others don’t is warmth. Brown arrived at this after initially finding him the hardest to approach: “The value of Marcus, once you have read a bit of Stoicism, is that it presents a much warmer portrait of what Stoicism can be. That’s his appeal. It’s a much softer, more human sense of what a philosophy can be that is prone to sounding a bit harsh and inhuman on first reading.” The emperor writing private notes to remind himself of what matters is a more approachable figure than the philosophical treatise-writer, and the imperfection of the text, its repetitions, its circlings, and its occasional failures of Stoic self-possession, is itself part of what makes it persuasive.