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It is becoming increasingly difficult to stay hopeful when every morning begins with a flood of despair. Before we even leave bed, the world has unravelled again on our screens. War, politics, climate collapse, scandal. The more connected we become, the more fractured we feel. The instinct is to search for calm, but the world seems determined to deny it.
This quiet crisis of spirit is not new. The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome wrestled with the same question: how to live well in a world that is out of our control? Their answer was not to deny chaos but to endure it with clarity. Marcus Aurelius, who governed Rome during wars and plague, wrote, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”
Two thousand years later, that wisdom feels freshly urgent. The modern mind has not evolved for the constant stream of catastrophe we consume each day. We are overloaded with injustice, information, and outrage. The internet has turned empathy into a commodity and fear into a business model. Yet the practice of Stoicism asks us to pause and see that our attention is our most valuable possession. To choose where it goes is to reclaim a kind of power.
Epictetus wrote that suffering comes not from events themselves, but from our judgment of them. It is a philosophy of perception. When everything feels unbearable, the Stoic response is not apathy but awareness. To know that the world will always bring chaos, but that chaos does not need to live inside you.
I am not suggesting that we stop caring. Indifference is not the answer, and Stoicism is not a call to emotional withdrawal. Caring deeply about the world is what makes us human. But when we try to carry all of it, we risk collapsing under its weight. The Stoics believed compassion should lead to action, not paralysis. To care effectively, we must first protect the mind that allows us to do so. Turning away from constant noise is not a rejection of responsibility; it is the groundwork for it. It is the quiet that lets us think clearly, act wisely, and stay kind even when everything around us feels cruel.
There is a quiet dignity in this restraint. Turning off the news for a day is not an embrace of ignorance. It is choosing peace over panic; choosing to respond, rather than react. When we resist the demand to feel everything, all the time, we create the space to act with meaning.
This philosophy does not ask us to retreat from the world, but to meet it with composure. To care without collapsing. To act without being consumed. The Stoics called this eudaimonia: a state of inner flourishing built on virtue rather than comfort. Perhaps this is what our generation is searching for: not endless optimism, but the steadiness to endure.
Seneca the Younger once observed, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.” Today, that waste is measured in attention. We spend it on the infinite scroll, on anxiety we cannot resolve, on disasters we cannot touch. But life still exists in the spaces we overlook: in small acts of kindness, in quiet mornings, in the moments we choose stillness over stimulation.
To practise Stoicism in the twenty-first century is to reclaim ownership of the self. It is not about suppressing feeling, but refining it.
And in a world that feeds on fear, choosing peace might be the most rebellious thing we can do.
