Practical Stoicism

After more than a decade of studying and practising Stoicism, and nearly six years of teaching it, I don’t think the average person knows much more about it today than when I started. So in this episode I answer the question in the title as plainly as I can, after a few minutes of deliberately grumpy preamble meant to send away anyone who isn’t here to learn.
Stoicism is a virtue ethics framework, which means it cares about your character and the quality of your reasoning more than rules (Deontology) or outcomes (Consequentialism). I use the example of a charity donation to show how a Utilitarian, a Kantian, and a Stoic would each explain why the act is good, and why the Stoic says it stays good even if the charity goes bankrupt the next day.
From there I get into the claim underneath the whole thing: something is good when it does well what it was designed or evolved to do. A good knife cuts well, a good eye sees well, and a good human being reasons well. I explain how philosophers arrive at reason as our defining trait, why that argument is logically valid without being provably correct, and why accepting it is “rational confidence” and nothing like religious faith (gravity gets a look in here). If you won’t take that premise on board, you can still borrow Stoic tools the way Cognitive Behavioural Therapy does, but you can’t practise Stoicism.
I then look at whether anything has disproven Stoicism. Modern science has overturned three of the ancient claims that supported it (a purposeful and divine cosmos, literal biological design, and purely cognitive emotions), and yet the ethical core has held up, with support from Lawrence Becker’s work, from the CBT of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, and from centuries of surviving rival philosophies.
Finally, I explain why I think Modern Stoicism went too far in cutting out the physics and the logic, why I think Orthodox Stoicism needs a vocabulary update and not much else (Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on predictive processing comes up on the emotions question), and why what I’ll be teaching you is what I call Complete Stoicism.
You should leave this episode understanding three things: there is an ongoing disagreement about what counts as Stoicism, you have to accept that right reason is what makes a human being good in order to benefit from the philosophy, and there is a lot more to all this than you probably thought.
Learn about how you can work with me: https://tannerocampbell.com
Apply for an upcoming cohort: https://cohort.tannerocampbell.com
Join the community: https://skool.com/tannerocampbell
Mentioned in this episode:
Group Stoicism Cohort Winter 26-27 Details

Community: https://skool.com/tannerocampbell
Podcast website: https://stoicismpod.com
My website: https://tannerocampbell.com
Group work: https://cohort.tannerocampbell.com
Private Counsel work: https://book.tannerocampbell.com
My books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B0D6P6L3CQ/allbooks
Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/134-labs

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@tannerowenscampbell
Cohort information: https://cohort.tannerocampbell.com
Purchase the archive: https://www.stoicismpod.com/the-archive
Email: tanner@nosages.com

In this episode, I'm talking about how to use social media as a Stoic, although I should probably begin by admitting that I really don't like social media. I think these platforms have made it far too easy for uninformed opinions to become influential simply because they're popular. And while social media has certainly made connecting with people easier, I'm not convinced the benefits outweigh the damage it can do to our ability to think critically, evaluate information, and form reasonable judgments.
Join my free Stoicism community for earnest practitioners: https://skool.com/tannerocampbell
I offer three pieces of advice for using social media without allowing it to compromise your reasoning and judgment.
First, understand what social media platforms actually reward. Popularity, engagement, and mass appeal are not reliable indicators of accuracy or expertise. Even knowledgeable creators have incentives to package their information in ways that attract attention rather than encourage careful understanding. Before accepting what someone says, consider why you're seeing it and what qualifies that person to speak on the subject.
Second, learn to distinguish between information that confirms your opinions and information that's actually true. I use parenting advice as an example, particularly the endless stream of confident recommendations Ross and I encounter about how we should raise our son. It's remarkably easy to accept advice from someone with no particular expertise simply because it agrees with what we already believe. When we repeat that advice to others, we can end up spreading poorly supported claims while imagining we're sharing knowledge.
Third, limit your time on social media. If most of your information comes from short videos, influencers, and algorithmically selected opinions rather than books, lectures, documentaries, or other serious sources of instruction, you're likely doing yourself a disservice. Stoicism asks us to develop our capacity for sound judgment, and that requires exposing ourselves to more than whatever happens to appear in our feeds.
Ultimately, I suggest treating social media as something to visit briefly rather than somewhere to live intellectually. Enjoy the people who make you laugh, consider what you encounter critically, and then spend more of your time engaging with the world and learning from people who genuinely understand their subjects.
Justice, after all, concerns what we owe to the wider human community, and we're unlikely to contribute much to the cosmopolis if we spend our lives reinforcing our own opinions inside algorithmically constructed echo chambers.
Mentioned in this episode:
Group Stoicism Cohort Winter 26-27 Details

In this episode, I'm talking about how to get over your ex, particularly when a relationship ends that you valued more than the other person did. Breakups can be especially difficult because, unlike losing someone to death, you have to watch someone you once shared a life with go on living theirs without you. Over time, the relationship can begin to feel like something that happened in another lifetime, and it's easy to get caught up in missing them, resenting them, or questioning what any of it meant.
Join my free Stoicism community for earnest practitioners: https://skool.com/tannerocampbell
I approach getting over an ex through three steps grounded in Stoic philosophy, beginning with understanding where your actual value comes from.
For the Stoics, our worth isn't determined by our relationships, careers, wealth, or whether somebody wants to be with us. It resides in our rational faculty, the hegemonikon, which receives impressions, forms judgments, and directs our choices. This faculty makes us capable of acting as rational moral agents, and the character we develop through its exercise is what matters most.
From there, I ask you to examine what you're doing with that faculty. Are your thoughts and judgments helping you become someone you respect, or are you allowing resentment, longing, and frustration to shape your character? I use some admittedly ridiculous metaphors involving moral auras, coloured plastic, and keeping the inside of your mind from becoming a pigsty, but the point is serious: the quality of our inner lives affects how we show up in the world.
Finally, I explain why recognising your responsibility to develop good character changes how you think about your ex. You have something more important to attend to than a relationship that's ended: becoming a decent, rational, virtuous person, not just for your own sake but for the benefit of everyone who shares the cosmopolis with you.
The Stoic approach isn't to make your ex irrelevant by pretending the relationship never mattered. It's to recognise that your value was never theirs to give you or take away, and that your attention belongs to the person you're becoming rather than the relationship you've lost.
Mentioned in this episode:
Group Stoicism Cohort Winter 26-27 Details