Come Together

All this makes it significant that today, in an era of bitter partisanship and social animus, Stoicism is having a renaissance. Aurelius has always been popular among generals, statesmen, and soldiers. But now even more obscure figures like Zeno and Epictetus are drawing a far wider audience. Books like The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday have been hugely successful, and the sub-reddit r/Stoicism, an online forum for applying Stoic teaching to daily modern life, has 496,000 members as of this writing (they call themselves prokoptontes, a Greek word for students making progress along a course of study). Members of this online stoa (mostly young men, by the looks of it) mine the great texts for insight on everything from dating and social niceties to career strategy and physical fitness.