/lit/ - Literature

>>18416678
This pop interest into Stoicism is so blatantly an off-shoot of the interest towards self-help that it blends into the same thing, and at this rate the zoomer enthusiasts of stoicism are willing to admit it. It functions because it assumes that all issues begin and end in internal factors and internal responses to such factors, and such mentality is the key for self-help as an industry to continue existing and profiting out of the miserable idiots of the world. The main assumption being that your problems are ultimately caused by your internal responses and internal philosophies to the world around you, not by the circumstances, elements of the environment, people, events and phenomena happening all around you, inflicting themselves upon you. The response to a life where all afflictions are internal is a change of your internal functioning to a new philosophy provided by a new movement, a new self-help book, a new psychological state not too different from a drug. It is an attempt to willinlgy blind oneself from the external factors, external actors and external circumstances causing you affliction, not at all different from drinking, snorting or injecting to numb yourself from the pain of life.

This is why movements like Objectivism are so reviled. They actually demand that you acknowledge the external factors and circumstances that are affecting your life directly, understand their objective and empirically verifiable functioning and with that information, that truth, become capable of navigating such elements of the environment and external factors, being capable to change and solve the problems around you, and thus freeing yourself from the negative effects they have on your psyche.

In sum, self-help and crypto-self-help bullshit like stoicism merely tells you that all your problems are caused by internal factors and that by changing those factors you can magically solve all your problems, as opposed to facing the effects and influence of external factors on your quality of life, psychological well-being and life satisfaction, because if you learn how to deal with the external elements harming your happiness, then you are free from pop philosophies and self-help pop books.