Stoicism, debugged

Why I spent two hours on this

Most of the Stoicism I see online is a quote laid over a photo of a marble statue. I wanted the version that survives contact with evidence.

Massimo Pigliucci is a good test for that. He trained as an evolutionary biologist before moving into philosophy, and he wrote How to Be a Stoic (2017). In this Big Think interview, he spends nearly two hours on what Stoicism actually claims, and on what a modern Stoic should stop believing.

The format is the same as everything in Life Lab: summary first, then where I agree and where I don’t. Anything attributed to Pigliucci comes from the interview, paraphrased. Anything else is my own reading or a cited source.

The popular version vs. the real one

Pigliucci starts from biology, not inspiration: humans are deeply social animals who are capable of reason. The Stoic goal, eudaimonia, roughly means a life worth living, and for an animal like us that means using reason well, alongside other people. Measured against that starting point, most pop Stoicism gets the basics wrong.

One decision rule: what’s up to you

The core of Stoicism is a sorting rule from Epictetus. Some things are up to us: our judgments, our values, our actions. Everything else isn’t: other people, markets, the weather, our reputation, how things turn out.

Pigliucci’s reason for taking this seriously is practical, not mystical. We have limited time and energy. An hour spent agonizing over something you can’t affect is an hour not spent on something you can. His example is someone who reads the news constantly and gets depressed by it. They aren’t helping anyone. They’ve made themselves less useful to the people who actually depend on them.

The rule isn’t “don’t care.” It’s: act hard on what’s yours, and meet the rest with equanimity. When I ran my own life through it, the result looked like this.

You’re running several roles at once

Epictetus adds something most summaries skip: role ethics. You don’t act as one person in a vacuum. You act as several people at once. Pigliucci lists his own: son, father, husband, friend, teacher, colleague, citizen. Each role carries its own obligations, and they all draw on the same limited hours.

That reframes the news example. Doom-scrolling isn’t just a personal habit. It’s a cost paid by every role that needed you that evening.

My own list right now: someone working long weeks in a full-time job, a Computer Programming student at George Brown, an investor working toward a mutual fund licence, a runner, a son, and a newcomer to Canada still learning how its systems work. When I ask “which of these roles does this hour serve?”, a surprising number of hours serve none of them.

Three disciplines, practised daily

Epictetus organized Stoic training into three disciplines, and Pigliucci walks through each. They run in order: decide what matters, act on it with other people, and keep checking that your judgments are sound.

1. Desire

   What you value, and what you avoid

   Pigliucci is clear that “desire” doesn’t mean whatever you fancy at the moment. It means your considered values and disvalues. The training is auditing that list: am I wanting things that aren’t up to me?

   My application: move the goal inside my control. The goal isn’t “get the job.” It’s “send the strongest application I can.”

2. Action

   How you treat other people

   Values have to show up in behaviour, in every role you hold. This is why Stoicism is social by design: if humans are social animals, a good life can’t be built alone.

3. Assent

   What you accept as true

   Before agreeing with an impression (“this is a disaster,” “he disrespected me”), check it. Epictetus’s best-known line points straight at this: people aren’t disturbed by things, but by their judgments about things (Enchiridion 5).

   This is the discipline closest to my work. In LLM evaluation, a response that sounds confident still has to be verified before it’s accepted. Assent is the same habit, applied to your own thoughts.

What gets deleted: the ancient physics

This is where Pigliucci separates himself from Stoicism as a tradition. The ancient Stoics believed the universe was a living, rational, providential whole, and they argued for it from design: things fit their purpose too well to be accidental.

Pigliucci points to two thinkers who broke that argument. David Hume dismantled design arguments philosophically. Charles Darwin then supplied a mechanism, natural selection, that produces fit without a designer.

His conclusion: drop the physics and keep the ethics. He also sees this as Stoicism working as intended, because the Stoics treated their philosophy as open to revision, unlike more rigid systems.

For me, this is the most important point in the interview. It’s the standard I’d hold any model to: when the evidence changes, the model updates. A philosophy that can’t do that is a belief system.

Where I push back

“Up to me” is rarely binary

Most of what I care about is partly in my control: a marathon time, a portfolio’s return, a job offer. William Irvine proposed a “trichotomy” of control to deal with exactly this. The Stoic reply is fair: split the partial thing into controllable inputs and set goals only on those. I use that. But I don’t pretend the outcome stops mattering. I still want the job.

Equanimity can become an excuse

“Accept what you can’t control” is an easy way to stop trying on things that are only hard, not impossible. The discipline of action is the guardrail. Acceptance applies to outcomes. It never applies to effort.

I walked in with the wrong frame

I planned to write this piece as “Stoicism as energy management.” The interview doesn’t support that. Pigliucci does say time and energy are limited, but the reason to conserve them is to stay useful to others in your roles, not to maximize personal output. A productivity reading gets the purpose backwards. It also drifts toward the thing Stoicism is wrongly accused of: treating emotions as bugs to be removed.

An evidence check on “limited energy”

The popular idea that willpower is a fuel tank that runs empty, known as ego depletion, largely failed a large preregistered multi-lab replication (Hagger et al., 2016). So I read “limited energy” literally, as limited hours and attention. That’s plainly true, and it’s enough to make Pigliucci’s argument work.

Control what’s yours, serve the roles you hold, check your judgments, and update when the evidence does. That’s the whole operating system.