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This idea rings familiar to me as someone who got into the stoicism trend, but then realized issues with it. The problem isn’t that your house fell down and you

This idea rings familiar to me as someone who got into the stoicism trend, but then realized issues with it. The problem isn’t that your house fell down and you lost your job and now you can’t afford therapy, the problem is that you haven’t stopped to think how much worse it could be and how grateful you should feel about how things are right now. If we can reframe bad management and unfulfilling work into an employee’s emotional problem, then suddenly everything is easier, isn’t it? A good worker takes their medication before coming in, and goes to therapy to learn how to be better at following their manager’s instructions, and takes more medication in the evening to feel good after a long day’s work. Well, I guess there’s nothing new under the sun, these things have been happening to some degree for a while, and especially self-medicating with things like weed and alcohol when not working. Will having a majority-un-medicated workforce soon put a country at an economic disadvantage? Will the alternative become a cultural relic that some countries fight to preserve through regulation, the way France preserves its traditional cheeses?

Bakary 6y ago
The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual. The same goes for mindfulness. Both of these industries (yes, they are industries) have been eagerly embraced by the private sector since they make fixing the mood of workers both a quantifiable goal and one where their own responsibility is no longer taken into consideration. In We by Zamyatin and Brave New World, the non-medicated elements of society eventually rebel against the new order. In our case, the scope of medication is already starting to show its limits so I don't think we will get to the scenario you describe. This sort of life is just too inherently unsatisfying to be masked by meds, not to mention that workers now can directly see just how poor they are compared to their masters and just how much surplus the masters capture.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  There’s differences between talk therapy and simply taking psychiatric medication, though.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    I prefer to group the interventions based on their methodological intent. Meds and talk sound like they would have radically different outcomes, but if the core intention is just to paper over the worker's reluctance to work, they will tend to have similar effects and consequences over time.
- rchaud 6y ago
  > The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual. Agreed. I spotted this right at the time when I saw stoicism beginning to be 'productized' via books, journals, podcasts and courses.
  - odyssey7 6y ago
    Ryan Holiday, who is an author of several stoicism books and even sells "memento mori" coins that you can keep on your person to remember that you will die, happens to be American Apparel's former marketing director. Incidentally, I learned more from his earlier, non-stoicism book, "Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator." A prescient book for the current wave of media manipulation.
Apocryphon 6y ago
This seems like an overly dismissive response to individualistic health fads like wellness. Clearly mental health is a widespread issue in this society and merits a widespread push for availability and affordability, and exacerbates problems lower on Maslow’s hierarchy. And besides, if the U.S. was a country that already had the wherewithal for top-down solutions at the scale of guaranteeing widespread access to affordable therapy, it would already be a country so much more advanced and friendlier to communal solutions than the one at present; one could imagine such a country has also made progress on other material concerns such as labor conditions and anomie resulting from the capitalist grind.
ChildOfChaos 6y ago
But if all those things happen, that is a good response. If your house fell down and you lost your job and now you can't afford therapy that does suck, but what are you going to do? Those things happened, you can either just fall into a crumbling mess or appreciate what you still have and focus on the things you can control from that. Yes, I get what you are saying about management, but if you don't shift the focus onto yourself and self responsibility then you are still doomed yourself, you cannot change how the management react etc, what you can do is either 1) Make it known and try and change that system 2) Get the hell out of there. Things that can only happen if you acknowledge the situation and take personal responsibility. You have mistaken the stoic framework for something that makes you powerless and a system that allows others to more easily control you. Yes it could be used in the way you are mentioning but it is not at all meant that way, there are 'preferred indifferences' and a true practitioner of stoic would seek to change that system or remove themselves from it if they could, if they absolutely can't then using these techniques isn't so bad, because it's all you can do, but it would be right and preferred to fix this.
- odyssey7 6y ago
  This is a fair defense of stoicism. It addresses my critique nicely.

Bakary 6y ago

The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual. The same goes for mindfulness. Both of these industries (yes, they are industries) have been eagerly embraced by the private sector since they make fixing the mood of workers both a quantifiable goal and one where their own responsibility is no longer taken into consideration. In We by Zamyatin and Brave New World, the non-medicated elements of society eventually rebel against the new order. In our case, the scope of medication is already starting to show its limits so I don't think we will get to the scenario you describe. This sort of life is just too inherently unsatisfying to be masked by meds, not to mention that workers now can directly see just how poor they are compared to their masters and just how much surplus the masters capture.

Apocryphon 6y ago
There’s differences between talk therapy and simply taking psychiatric medication, though.
- Bakary 6y ago
  I prefer to group the interventions based on their methodological intent. Meds and talk sound like they would have radically different outcomes, but if the core intention is just to paper over the worker's reluctance to work, they will tend to have similar effects and consequences over time.
rchaud 6y ago
> The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual. Agreed. I spotted this right at the time when I saw stoicism beginning to be 'productized' via books, journals, podcasts and courses.
- odyssey7 6y ago
  Ryan Holiday, who is an author of several stoicism books and even sells "memento mori" coins that you can keep on your person to remember that you will die, happens to be American Apparel's former marketing director. Incidentally, I learned more from his earlier, non-stoicism book, "Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator." A prescient book for the current wave of media manipulation.

Apocryphon 6y ago

This seems like an overly dismissive response to individualistic health fads like wellness. Clearly mental health is a widespread issue in this society and merits a widespread push for availability and affordability, and exacerbates problems lower on Maslow’s hierarchy. And besides, if the U.S. was a country that already had the wherewithal for top-down solutions at the scale of guaranteeing widespread access to affordable therapy, it would already be a country so much more advanced and friendlier to communal solutions than the one at present; one could imagine such a country has also made progress on other material concerns such as labor conditions and anomie resulting from the capitalist grind.

ChildOfChaos 6y ago

But if all those things happen, that is a good response. If your house fell down and you lost your job and now you can't afford therapy that does suck, but what are you going to do? Those things happened, you can either just fall into a crumbling mess or appreciate what you still have and focus on the things you can control from that. Yes, I get what you are saying about management, but if you don't shift the focus onto yourself and self responsibility then you are still doomed yourself, you cannot change how the management react etc, what you can do is either 1) Make it known and try and change that system 2) Get the hell out of there. Things that can only happen if you acknowledge the situation and take personal responsibility. You have mistaken the stoic framework for something that makes you powerless and a system that allows others to more easily control you. Yes it could be used in the way you are mentioning but it is not at all meant that way, there are 'preferred indifferences' and a true practitioner of stoic would seek to change that system or remove themselves from it if they could, if they absolutely can't then using these techniques isn't so bad, because it's all you can do, but it would be right and preferred to fix this.

odyssey7 6y ago
This is a fair defense of stoicism. It addresses my critique nicely.