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Aperture Philosophy Culture Health

Stoicism: Become Undefeatable

Aperture's primer on Stoicism, built around Zeno of Citium watching his fortune sink in a shipwreck and refusing to be destroyed by it. It reconstructs the whole working philosophy: what Stoicism actually is, the slave, statesman, and emperor who carried it (Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius), and the core practices of voluntary discomfort and the dichotomy of control. The spine is a single idea, that you control almost nothing that happens to you but everything about how you respond, walked through the four cardinal virtues and Viktor Frankl's space between stimulus and response. It closes with Nelson Mandela rebuilding rather than avenging after twenty seven years in prison, and with Stoicism living on in modern therapies like REBT and Logotherapy.

Published Apr 30, 2021 12:52 video 20 min read Added Jul 5, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

This is a tight, thirteen minute primer on Stoicism built around one image: a rich merchant named Zeno watching his entire fortune sink to the bottom of the sea, and choosing not to be destroyed by it. From that shipwreck Aperture unpacks the whole working philosophy: what Stoicism actually is (a way to see the world, not just a way to look unbothered), who carried it (a slave, a statesman, and an emperor), why people still live by it, and the practices that make it usable, from voluntary discomfort to the dichotomy of control.

The spine is a single claim, repeated from a dozen angles: you control almost nothing that happens to you, but you control everything about how you respond, and a good life is built by investing only in the second column. The video walks that idea through the four cardinal virtues, shows it working in Nelson Mandela after twenty seven years in prison, and lands it in a modern clinic, where the same logic now powers Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy. It is short, but it is a full argument, not a highlight reel.

Zeno's shipwreck: the accident that started a philosophy

The film opens around 300 BC with Zeno of Citium, a very wealthy trader from the city of Kition on the island of Cyprus. On a voyage carrying his cargo toward Piraeus, the port of Athens, his ship sank and took everything with it. In a single event, one entirely outside Zeno's control or anyone else's, a rich man became a poor one in an instant.

The narrator makes you sit inside it. Imagine your entire life's work flushed down the drain by the sheer force of nature. What is the correct reaction? Anger? Grief? The feeling that life has cheated you? For most people those would all be normal. They were not, however, Zeno's. That refusal to be leveled by a loss he did not choose is the seed of the whole system, and it points at the idea the video will hammer for the next twelve minutes: one small reframing of your mindset can cascade into far larger changes down the line. The core of Stoicism, as Aperture puts it, is the very definition of acceptance and indifference.

Zeno read Socrates and the other great philosophers, then built and taught his own school. His founding insight: although we do not have much control over what happens to us, we do have control over how it affects us, and we are obligated to use that control well. Rather than crying over spilled milk, or in this case drowned goods, Zeno held his composure, stayed calm and neutral inside the wreckage, and got to work. The school took its name from the Stoa Poikile, the painted public porch in Athens where he taught, which matters more than it sounds, as the next section shows.

What Stoicism actually is, and is not

Today, the narrator notes, people accidentally reduce Stoics to people who cannot be broken, who never slip into fits of rage or bouts of anxiety. That caricature (unemotional, stone faced, shut down) misses the original idea by a wide margin. Stoicism was never merely a description of people who do not cry. It was a way to view, describe, and understand the world, a full way of life, and that way of life has lasted for centuries. The claim the video wants you to take seriously is that it still works: Stoic philosophy applies to a situation today the same way it applied thousands of years ago, and the payoff is just as real. It lets you take the negative emotions that come out of negative experiences and convert them into a genuine perspective on the world, and perspective, the narrator insists, is everything.

Because the Stoics gathered and taught in a public place, the philosophy was widely known rather than locked behind the walls of a school or a palace. They believed the principles could benefit anyone, so hiding them made no sense. The result is the detail the video clearly loves: everyone from slave to emperor could become a Stoic, and they did. The three names it puts forward prove the range.

Epictetus, whose name literally translates to "acquired," because he was once owned as a slave.
Seneca, a well renowned statesman and one of the richest men in Rome.
Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and one of the most powerful human beings who has ever lived, whose private journal survives as Meditations.

The early Stoics also practiced what they preached socially. They rejected segregation and pushed against inequality, and they even coined the word cosmopolitan, which literally means "citizen of the world." When we hear that word now we think of New York, Toronto, Dubai, or London for their diversity, but that unity and togetherness is exactly what the Stoics were after. On gender they were centuries ahead of their moment. At Stoicism's founding, women were barred from philosophy, and the Stoics disagreed completely. Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, argued that women possess the same eagerness and natural inclination toward virtue that men do, take the same pleasure in noble and just deeds, and therefore have exactly as much business practising philosophy. Even when it was unpopular, women were free to learn Stoicism and become Stoics.

c. 300 BCZeno of Citium loses his cargo in a shipwreck, reads Socrates, and founds Stoicism in the public Stoa in Athens.
c. 4 BC to 65 ADSeneca, statesman and playwright, writes the letters on living with less that the video quotes.
c. 30 ADMusonius Rufus, Epictetus' teacher, insists women can practise philosophy just as well as men.
c. 55 to 135 ADEpictetus, born a slave, teaches the dichotomy of control in the Discourses and the Enchiridion.
121 to 180 ADMarcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, writes Meditations to himself as a private practice.
1946Viktor Frankl publishes Man's Search for Meaning and builds Logotherapy on the Stoic idea that purpose is chosen.
1955Albert Ellis founds REBT, citing Epictetus, and modern cognitive therapy inherits the frame.
1964 to 1990Nelson Mandela reads Marcus Aurelius in prison and comes out to rebuild rather than avenge.

Figure 1. Slave, statesman, emperor, and modern torchbearers. The lineage the video sketches, from Zeno's porch to a prison cell on Robben Island to a therapist's office, showing how one idea kept getting rediscovered because it kept working.

Why people live by it: the rain we learned to expect

So why do so many people still adopt Stoicism as a way of life? Because in a world of constant unexpected turns, our emotions get in the way. The narrator sharpens the usual story with a precise correction. We do not actually get sad because bad things happen to us. We get sad because unexpected bad things happen to us.

The proof is rain. Rain is genuinely good: it waters plants, feeds livestock, keeps things cool and humid. But when a dark cloud catches you outside without an umbrella, it is never a good time. So why do we not burst into tears the instant it starts? Because we have learned to expect rain. It is unavoidable, we cannot control the weather, it sucks, and then it passes and the light returns. Stoicism asks you to extend that same acceptance to everything else: expect that everything bad that can happen, will happen. Picture the worst outcome and be content knowing it could arrive. That practice has a name the Stoics gave it, premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils, and it is the disciplined version of learning to expect the rain. It shades into the deeper Stoic posture of amor fati, the love of one's fate: not merely enduring what comes but accepting it as though you had chosen it.

Voluntary discomfort: rehearsing the worst on purpose

The most hands on exercise in the video is voluntary discomfort, aimed squarely at increasing gratitude. The prescriptions are deliberately small and slightly absurd: sleep on the floor of your kitchen, take a cold shower when you would normally take a hot one, eat nothing but potatoes for a few days. The point is not suffering for its own sake. By voluntarily withstanding these uncomfortable situations, you learn in your body that no matter how hard it gets, you will still survive, and if your mindset is right you may even thrive. You are rehearsing misfortune while the stakes are low, so that when real misfortune arrives your nervous system already knows the floor is survivable. It indirectly prepares you for future losses, and it resets your baseline so that a warm shower and a full meal register as the luxuries they are.

The narrator sets this against the modern noise machine. Advertisements are shoved down our throats constantly, training us to believe that without the next best thing, the right look, or a certain income, we can never be happy. In that environment, a practice built to make you grateful for a hot shower is not quaint. It is a countermeasure, and the narrator argues it matters now more than ever.

Why external sources of happiness always fail

We arrive knowing almost nothing, then get taught by three teachers at once: home, school, and our own observation of the world. The trouble is that all three often teach in different directions, and if we internalize all of it uncritically we quietly set unrealistic expectations that leave us disappointed and unsatisfied. That, the narrator says flatly, is no way to live. The alternative is to improve yourself for yourself, to do things for their own sake and no other reason. The moment you attach external hope or a secondary payoff to an action, you have almost guaranteed disappointment.

Most of us do the opposite. We try to fill the emptiness with external things: blowing money on a fancy car, a house, even starting a family for its external value rather than its internal one. Stoicism warns that this places your happiness in the hands of forces that can always fail, and then lists the ways they fail. Cars break down. Natural disasters wipe away entire cities. Divorce rates climb every year. And even the free things carry a cost, the cost of space, both physical and mental. As Seneca wrote, learning to live with less creates room in your life for the things that truly matter. The instruction, then, is to relocate your happiness onto your intrinsic value as a human being and onto nothing you own or could ever acquire, and to keep a cool head regardless of what life throws at you. Which lands the film on its central principle.

The dichotomy of control

Whatever you want, at the end of the day you do not control the majority of what happens to you, but you have total control over how you react. That is the dichotomy of control, and the narrator calls it the single most important principle in all of Stoic philosophy. He hands the definition to Epictetus: the chief task in life is simply to identify and separate things, so you can say clearly which are externals not under your control and which are the choices you actually control. Striving toward a goal is a good trait. Breaking down when the goal does not arrive on schedule is, from a Stoic's point of view, useless.

Figure 2. Stoicism's most important principle on one page. Epictetus asks you to sort every worry into one of two columns and then invest your identity only in the right one. Everything in the left column can fail, so basing your happiness there guarantees eventual grief.

The video grounds this with two very ordinary examples. First, its own trade. Making YouTube videos, the narrator jokes, is a lot easier than being a Roman emperor, but it still has its trials: form the idea, which takes forever, research it, scrap it because it stinks, start over, script it, shoot it, edit it, build the thumbnail and the title, then finally hit upload. Everything up to that click is entirely up to you. The instant you click, the power shifts to the YouTube algorithm. Yet most creators judge their success by views and subscribers, metrics almost entirely outside their control. The Stoic move is to judge your work by the effort you put in, not by the outcome your external hopes were riding on. Trust the process.

Second, a promotion. A man works hard for six months, feels he has earned a promotion, walks his performance report to his boss, and gets a polite thanks and nothing else. He goes home certain he must be bad at his job. What he never considers is that the boss may have simply woken up angry, that someone else may have been better qualified that day, or that the company may have been losing money and could not afford it. He does not know the reason, but he is crushed anyway. Had he instead placed his value on the quality of the report he actually turned in, and kept doing the work that earns promotions, he would have been far happier, and his goal would not have been destroyed, only postponed. That reframing is the whole discipline. A true Stoic does not measure success by the money a venture makes, but is comforted by knowing they can live a good life without any of the things money buys.

The four Stoic virtues

Stoicism organizes the good life around four main virtues, the classical cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

Wisdom is the ability to separate the internal from the external, and then to choose your reaction to whatever happens. The narrator borrows Viktor Frankl's line for it: between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. That gap is where wisdom lives.
Courage, he says, is two words: persist and resist. Keep going toward what is right, and hold the line against what is not.
Temperance, or moderation, is doing more with less and saying more with fewer words, and the narrator points out he just demonstrated it with that one line definition. While Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk trade places at the top of the Forbes list, the Stoic sets the limit of wealth at having what is essential, and then having what is enough.
Justice is the one the narrator calls the most important of all. It teaches that no one should do harm to another, because we were all born for each other, to do good to one another rather than only to ourselves, an idea that runs straight through Marcus Aurelius.

Figure 3. The four cardinal virtues as the video frames them. Wisdom sees clearly, courage persists and resists, temperance takes only what is enough, and justice remembers we were made for one another. For a Stoic these, not wealth or reputation, are the entire scoreboard.

Justice is where the video reaches for its most powerful modern example. Nelson Mandela fought apartheid, was sentenced to life imprisonment, and spent twenty seven years behind bars before his release. When he walked out and was elected president of South Africa, many assumed he would brutally punish everyone tied to apartheid or to his imprisonment. He did not. Throughout those years in prison Mandela read the works of Marcus Aurelius and absorbed the core values of Stoicism, and he practiced them for the rest of his life. Instead of calling for the heads of the wrongdoers, he urged his people toward the opposite: to relax and to rebuild. He stressed that the past was now beyond their control, and the only thing left to do was find a way forward and build a better nation. That, the narrator says, is the way of the Stoic, justice and the dichotomy of control fused into a single act of statesmanship.

Two ways to locate your happiness

Underneath every example the video sets up the same fork. You can build your life on things you acquire, or on the one thing that is actually yours. The Stoic case is that the first path is structurally doomed, because everything in it can be taken, while the second cannot.

The question	The externalist life	The Stoic life
Where happiness lives	In things you acquire: the car, the house, status, money	In your intrinsic value as a human, and nothing you can hold
What you bet on	Outcomes and other people's verdicts	Your own effort, judgment, and reactions
When it is lost	Devastation, the sense that life has cheated you	Composure, because it was never yours to keep
Measure of success	Views, subscribers, the promotion, the Forbes rank	The amount of effort you actually put in
The limit of wealth	Always the next best thing	What is essential, and then what is enough
The result	Disappointment, because externals always eventually fail	Peace that no shipwreck can sink

Figure 4. The choice the whole video keeps drawing. Cars break down, cities flood, algorithms ignore you, and bosses say no. Anchor your worth to the left column and grief is only a matter of time. Anchor it to the right and you become, in the video's word, undefeatable.

Stoicism in modern psychology

The film closes by showing that none of this stayed in antiquity. In modern medicine, Stoicism sits at the core of two therapies. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, or REBT, helps patients identify the negative thought patterns driving their emotional and behavioral problems, challenge the reasoning behind those thoughts with logic, and, on discovering that many of them are unfounded, replace them with more productive and healthier beliefs. That is Epictetus in a consulting room: it is not events that disturb us but our judgments about them, so fix the judgment. REBT's founder Albert Ellis said as much, and modern cognitive behavioral therapy inherited the frame.

Logotherapy, meanwhile, rests on the Stoic principle that human beings are driven by purpose. Its founder, Viktor Frankl, argued that even in the darkest situations we can fill our lives with meaning and happiness by finding out what that purpose is, though, as the narrator admits, this is far easier said than done. It is a process, like everything else here: we have to rewire how we think, out with the old and in with the new. The prescription the video ends on is to practice self worth by redirecting your definition of value onto the things you can control, so you stop fixating on the things you cannot, and lead a happier, more fulfilling life as a result.

The final image returns to the sea it started on. Stoicism helps us steer through the storms, past and present, into calmer water. And if the ship sinks anyway and we all drown, we can take peace in having lived a good life, even if it was not as long as we had hoped. Because, the narrator closes, everything has an end.

Key takeaways

You control your response, not the event. The dichotomy of control is the whole system in one line. Sort every worry into "up to me" and "not up to me," and invest your identity only in the first pile.
Sadness comes from the unexpected, not the bad. We do not cry when it rains because we expect rain. Stoicism asks you to expect the worst in the same way, through premeditatio malorum, so that misfortune loses its power to ambush you.
External happiness is built on things that can be taken. Cars break, cities flood, marriages end, algorithms ignore you. Anchor your worth to your intrinsic value instead, and to your effort rather than the outcome.
Voluntary discomfort is a gratitude machine. Cold showers, hard floors, and plain food prove to your body that the floor is survivable, and reset a baseline the advertising world keeps trying to raise.
The four virtues are the real scoreboard. Wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice are what a Stoic counts as good, not wealth or reputation. Justice, "we were born for each other," is the one the narrator ranks first.
It still works clinically. REBT and Logotherapy are Stoicism in a lab coat, and Nelson Mandela is the proof of concept at scale: read Marcus Aurelius in a cell, walk out, and rebuild instead of avenge.

Chapters

0:00 Stoicism: Become Undefeatable 1:27 Modern misconceptions about Stoicism 3:28 Why people adopt Stoicism as a way of life 4:24 "Voluntary discomfort" exercise to build mental resilience 5:50 Why external sources of happiness always fail 6:56 The dichotomy of control: Stoicism's most important principle 9:07 The four main virtues of Stoicism (wisdom, courage, temperance, justice) 10:55 Modern applications of Stoicism in psychology (REBT and Logotherapy)

Notable quotes

Although we don't have much control over what happens to us, we do have control of how it affects us, and we must use this control to great effect. Aperture narrator, on Zeno, 0:48

It is not men alone who possess eagerness and a natural inclination towards virtue, but women also. Since that is so, why is it appropriate for men to seek out and examine how they might live well, that is, to practise philosophy, but not women? Musonius Rufus, quoted at 2:55

Learning to live with less will create space in your life for the things that truly matter to you. Seneca, quoted at 6:20

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Epictetus, quoted at 7:05

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. Viktor Frankl, quoted at 9:20

No one should do harm to another because we were all born for each other, to do good to one another, and not to ourselves. Aperture narrator, on justice, 10:05

If our ship sinks and we all drown, we can take peace in the fact that we lived a good life, albeit not as long as we had hoped. Because remember, everything has an end. Aperture narrator, 12:38

Resources mentioned

Zeno of Citium, the shipwrecked merchant who founded Stoicism in the Athenian Stoa.
Socrates, whose works Zeno read before building his own school.
Epictetus, the former slave, and his Discourses and Enchiridion, source of the dichotomy of control.
Seneca, statesman, on living with less.
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, and his Meditations.
Musonius Rufus, Epictetus' teacher, on women and philosophy.
The four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.
Stoic practices: voluntary discomfort, premeditatio malorum, and amor fati.
Cosmopolitanism, the "citizen of the world" idea the Stoics coined.
Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid, a modern Stoic in practice.
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, and Logotherapy.
Albert Ellis, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and modern cognitive behavioral therapy.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the Forbes billionaires list, the video's foil for temperance.

Full transcript

In the city of Cyprus in 300 BC, there lived a very wealthy trader called Zeno. While on a voyage from Phoenicia to Piraeus, his boat sank, along with all of his cargo. Because of that single event, an event that was entirely out of Zeno's or anyone's control, this very wealthy man suddenly became poor in an instant. Imagine you were Zeno. How would you react to your entire life's work getting flushed down the drain by the sheer force of nature? What is the proper reaction? Would you be angry? Sad? Would you feel life has cheated you? For most of us, these would all be normal reactions, but not for Zeno, the father of Stoicism. One small change lasts an eternity, and one small reframing of your mindset can cascade into larger and more impactful changes later down the line. The core of Stoicism is the very definition of acceptance and indifference. After reading the works of Socrates and other great philosophers, Zeno created and taught Stoicism. According to Zeno, although we don't have much control over what happens to us, we do have control of how it affects us, and we must use this control to great effect. Rather than crying over spilled milk, or in this case, drowned goods, Zeno focused on maintaining his composure over the situation, remaining calm and neutral, despite his predicament. Today, people inadvertently view Stoics as people who cannot be broken, people who don't often linger to the emotional extremes, going through things like fits of rage or bouts of anxiety. But the original idea behind Stoicism was much more than that. Rather than just a way to describe people who are unemotional, Stoicism was a way to view, describe, and understand the world. It was a way of life, and that way of life has lasted for centuries. Stoic philosophy can be applied to situations today the same way it was applied thousands of years ago, and its benefits are just as impactful. Stoicism allows us to process these negative emotions from negative experiences, and turn them into the thoughts that give us a unique perspective of the world. Perspective is everything, and everyone in the world has different experiences and thus different perspectives on things. Since the Stoics gathered, discussed, and taught philosophy in a public place, their general philosophy was widely known. They believed that Stoic principles could greatly benefit anyone and everyone, and so it didn't make sense for them to hide that knowledge behind the four walls of a school, or of the palace courtyards. As a result, everyone from slave to Emperor could learn and become a Stoic, and they did. Some of the world's most notable Stoics include Epictetus, which translates to "acquired" as he was once owned as a slave, Seneca, who was a well-renowned statesman, and Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor, and one of the most powerful men to have ever lived. The early Stoics practiced what they preached, avoiding all forms of segregation and leading the fight against inequality. They even invented the word "cosmopolitan," which literally means "citizen of the world". When people hear that word now, we think of cities like New York, Toronto, Dubai, and London because of how diverse they are, this was the type of unity and togetherness that the Stoics preached. At the time of Stoicism's foundation, women weren't allowed to pursue philosophy, but Stoics disagreed with that completely. Musonius Rufus, Epictetus' teacher, once said, "it is not men alone who possess eagerness and a natural inclination towards virtue, but women also. Women are pleased no less than men by noble and just deeds, and reject the opposite of such actions. Since that is so, why is it appropriate for men to seek out and examine how they might live well, that is, to practise philosophy, but not women?" Even at a time when it wasn't popular, women were allowed to freely learn about Stoicism and become Stoics themselves. So why do so many people adopt Stoicism as a way of life? In a world full of unexpected turns of events, our emotions can tend to get in the way of things. In reality, we don't really get sad because bad things happen to us, we get sad because unexpected bad things happen to us. Rain is a good thing. It helps to water our plants, provides water for livestock, and keeps the temperature cool and humid. But the truth is, when that dark cloud catches you outside without an umbrella, it's never a good experience. So why don't we start crying once it starts to rain? It's because although the situation is bad, we've learned to expect rain. It's something that is unavoidable, we can't control the weather; although it sucks, the rain passes and the light returns. Stoicism teaches us that in the same way, we should expect that everything bad that can happen, will happen. Picture the worst outcome, and be content knowing it could happen. One of the Stoic exercises is known as "voluntary discomfort," an exercise aimed at increasing feelings of gratitude. Sleep on the floor of your kitchen, taking cold showers when you normally take hot ones, eat nothing but potatoes for a few days, things like this. This exercise helps you to understand that no matter how hard it gets, you'll still survive and potentially thrive if your mindset is right. By being able to withstand these uncomfortable situations, we indirectly prepare our mental for future misfortunes. With the current state of the world where advertisements are constantly shoved down our throats, we're made to believe that if we don't have the next best thing, look a certain way, or make a certain amount of money that we will never be happy, this message is important now more than ever. We enter the world not knowing much of anything. We grow up being taught things at home, in school, and by observing the world for ourselves. The thing is, a lot of times, all three of these sources of knowledge teach us in different ways. The question is, do we need to internalize all of this knowledge? If we do, we could unknowingly be setting unrealistic expectations for our lives, leaving us ultimately disappointed and unsatisfied in the end. That's no way to live. We should instead focus on improving ourselves, for ourselves. We should do things, for ourselves, and only for that reason. Attaching any external hope or secondary attachments to the actions we take almost always lead to disappointment. Most of the time, we end up trying to fill that emptiness with external things. Blowing all your money on a fancy car, a house, or even starting a family. Sometimes we do all of these things for their external value, and not their internal value. But, Stoicism teaches that, if you approach life this way, you place your happiness in the hands of external forces, forces that can always fail. Cars almost always break down, natural disasters wipe away entire cities, and divorce rates climb higher and higher each year. But even the free things in life come at a cost. The cost of space, both physical and mental. As Seneca once wrote, "learning to live with less will create space in your life for the things that truly matter to you." Instead, we must place our happiness on our intrinsic value as humans and on nothing we have or can physically acquire. We must choose to do our best to keep a cool head, regardless of what life throws at us. Because regardless of what it is we want, at the end of the day, we don't have any control over the majority of things that happen to us, but we do have all the control over how we react to those things. That is the dichotomy of control, the most important principle in Stoic philosophy. In the words of Epictetus, "the chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." Stoics teach that we must learn to separate what we can control from what we cannot control. We need to determine our value not from things we can't control, but from the things we can. Striving towards goals is a good trait, but breaking down when those things don't go your way is, in a Stoics point of view, useless. Making YouTube videos is well a lot easier than being a Roman Emperor, but it can still prove to be challenging sometimes. First, you must form your idea, which takes forever, then research that idea, scrap it because it sucks, start over, script the video, create the video, edit it, make the thumbnail, title, and everything else before you hit upload. Everything up until the point where you click upload is all up to you. However, once you click the upload button, the power shifts to the YouTube algorithm. Still, a lot of people judge the success of their YouTube channel or Instagram account based on how many views and subscribers or followers that they have, metrics of which for the most part, are beyond your control. Stoics teach that instead, you should judge the success of your work based on the amount of effort you put in, and not the outcome of your external hopes. Trust the process. Living with less means unbinding yourself from the societal handcuffs that you've essentially put yourself into. Think about a person who has been working hard at their job for the past 6 months. He now feels he deserves a promotion, and so he walks up to his boss with his performance report. The boss says thanks, doesn't grant him the promotion, and he goes home thinking he must suck at his job. He doesn't consider that the boss might've simply woken up angry, someone else might have been better qualified at that time, or maybe the company was just losing money and just couldn't afford it. He doesn't know the reason, but he's still upset. If he simply placed his value on the quality of the performance report he turned in, kept doing what he was doing to earn the promotion he wanted, he could've been much happier overall. With the right perspective, his goal wouldn't have been diminished, but just postponed. It's this reframing of your mindset that is crucial. A true Stoic does not view their successes based on the financial gain of their ventures, but is comforted by the fact that they can live a comfortable life without all the things money can buy. There are the 4 main virtues of Stoicism: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Wisdom is being able to separate between what is internal and what is external, and the ability to choose our reaction to the things that happen to us. As Viktor Frankl said, "between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." Courage, two words: "persist and resist". Temperance, or moderation, is what I just did there, doing more with less, saying more with fewer words. While Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fighting at the top of Forbes' list, Stoics believe that the limit of wealth should simply be having what is essential, and then having what is enough. Justice is the most important of all the virtues. It instructs that no one should do harm to another because we were all born for each other, to do good to one another, and not to ourselves. Nelson Mandela was one of the most famous African leaders in the world. While he was fighting against apartheid, he got sentenced to life imprisonment where he stayed for 27 years before finally being released. When he was released from prison, he was elected president of South Africa, and thus, many people thought he was going to brutally punish all the people that had anything to do with apartheid or his imprisonment, but of course, he did not. Throughout his time in prison, Mandela read the works of Marcus Aurelius and learned many of the core values of Stoicism, all of which he practiced throughout his life. Instead of calling for the heads of the wrongdoers, Nelson Mandela urged his people to instead seek the opposite. To relax, and rebuild. He stressed that the past was now beyond their control, and that the only thing they could do was to find a way to move forward and build a better nation. This is the way of the Stoic. In modern day medicine, Stoicism is at the core of procedures like Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy and Logotherapy. REBT helps patients to identify negative thought patterns that might be causing emotional and behavioral issues. It allows you to challenge the reasoning behind all these negative thoughts with logic, and when you realize that many of them are unfounded, you can then replace them with more productive and healthier beliefs. Logotherapy, on the other hand, is based on the Stoic principle that humans are driven by purpose. Even in the darkest of situations, we can fill our lives with meaning and happiness by simply finding out what that purpose is. As many of us know though, this is easier said than done. It's a process, much like everything else. We have to rewire the way we think. Out with the old, in with the new. To fix our problems with happiness, we must practice self-worth. By redirecting our definition of value to the things that we can control, we can stop getting fixated on the things that we cannot control, and overall, we can lead a much happier and more fulfilling life. Stoicism helps us steer through past and present storms into calmer and more peaceful waters. And if our ship sinks and we all drown, we can take peace in the fact that we lived a good life, albeit not as long as we had hoped. Because remember, everything has an end.