My interest in stoicism comes from personal experience. I suffered a neurological injury ten years ago as a young man. As a result I have lost everything (although according to a stoic I have lost nothing). I lost my health, my agency, my independence, my career, my love life, my sex life, my hobbies, my friends, my social status, even my identity. I live in excruciating agony every day, my whole body feels like it is on fire, I have constant migraines, I spend half my time lying in the dark hiding from light and sounds because they are like knives being driven into my eyes and ears respectively. I have severe insomnia and it is not uncommon for me to be awake for three days straight. My eyes, hurt my vision is blurry, everything hurts. My body is failing and malfunctioning in so many ways I would have to write a small book to list them all. I cannot function, I cannot take care of myself, most of the time I can barely read, I can barely follow a tv show, I have not felt human touch in a decade, my life is comprised of (almost) nothing but illness and loss.

I became very interested in stoicism a few years into my injury. I wanted to believe that it was possible to live a eudaemonic life even though I had lost so much. I was passionate about the philosophy and tried to incorporate it as a worldview, every time I found myself feeling sorry for myself or pining for the things I lost and the things of which I was deprived I would stop myself and attempt to focus on virtue. For a while this helped, my outlook on life improved somewhat. But eventually I realized I wasn’t a stoic at all! I was tricking myself! I was focused on virtue for instrumental reasons, not because I truly believed it had intrinsic value. Part of me thought that maybe if I changed my attitude, that I would be able to heal, maybe my health would return, maybe I would be able to work again, to date girls again! However, this was not to be, the illness remained, the pain remained, and it soon became clear that virtue is small comfort to a man starving to death.

I think stoicism would be a great philosophy for most peoples However I think the more a person needs it, the less possible it is to actually practice it. I prefer Aristotle’s conceptualization of virtue ethics, as he accepts that people have fundamental needs to be met before virtue is actually possible.