SOLVED with Mark Manson

Podbit · SOLVED with Mark Manson

Stoicism (ft. Ryan Holiday), Solved

Explore episode Oct 15, 2025
History
Stoicism as History's Self-Help

Stoicism (ft. Ryan Holiday), Solved · Oct 15, 2025 History

Stoicism has never fully disappeared — it's been an open secret passed person-to-person among the powerful for centuries. The Enlightenment thinkers, the American Founding Fathers, Civil War generals, and Vietnam POWs all turned to it. It resurges in turbulent times because when the world feels out of control, the most useful question is: what can I control about myself? The Stoics wrote the smartest answer to that question ever written.

3m 50s

Where this was said

Stoicism's Legacy: From the Enlightenment to Modern Self-Help

At 2:19:50 · chapter starts 2:15:40

Ryan Holiday traces the through-line of Stoic influence: the Enlightenment thinkers who absorbed it through Latin education (Seneca's epigrams were standard Latin learning texts), the American Founding Fathers who staged the play Cato before Valley Forge and explicitly modeled Washington's resignation of power on Stoic and classical ideals, and the way the Serenity Prayer — written on a train in the 1950s — synthesizes Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist ideas into one formula that reads as if it were ancient. Holiday identifies a pattern: Stoicism resurges in turbulent times because when the world is out of control, the most useful question is what you can control about yourself, and the Stoics wrote the smartest answer to that question.

Health & Fitness
Stoicism and CBT: 2,500 Years Ahead of Schedule

Stoicism (ft. Ryan Holiday), Solved · Oct 15, 2025 Health & Fitness

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, pioneered by Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis in the 1950s-60s, is essentially a scientific repackaging of Stoic ideas. The ABC model of adversity-behavior-consequence is Epictetus's framework for desire, action, and assent. The journaling practices are straight out of Seneca. Beck and Ellis both later credited Stoic philosophy — though it was largely after the fact. The Stoics were doing what therapists do, just 2,500 years earlier.

7m 30s

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