When Marcus Aurelius started popping up on Twitter timelines // startup pitch decks, I thought: good, maybe we’re getting somewhere. Maybe, we’re remembering that the world is uncontrollable, that virtue comes from how we respond to it.

But people aren’t just reading Epictetus for resilience or Seneca for perspective. They’re using Stoicism as a weapon against others, less as a philosophy and more as a cudgel. This is what I’ve come to think of as Stoic Sadism: the enjoyment some people seem to derive from suffering, as long as they can frame it as “character building.”

It’s an odd twist. A philosophy designed for self-mastery and compassion has (in some corners of the internet, at least) been reshaped into something sterner, colder, and punitive. When I see people argue that hardship is always secretly good, or that misfortune is a cosmic gym membership for which you should give thanks to the universe, I can’t help feeling a sense of overwhelming disappointment.

The danger is not that Stoicism teaches us to endure suffering.

The danger is when it teaches us to look at suffering and feel secretly pleased.

The Stoics were concerned with how an individual could live in harmony with reason and nature, despite the unpredictability of fate. Their focus was internal: what can I control, how can I cultivate virtue, how can I avoid being tossed around by fortune’s storms?

But in practice today, I see Stoicism slipping into a morality play where suffering is either deserved or redemptive. Instead of I will endure, it becomes they should be forced to endure.

History is filled with examples of philosophies curdling this way. Early Christianity’s celebration of martyrdom, for instance, sometimes shaded into a fascination with suffering for its own sake. Tertullian wrote with awe of blood and persecution as a proof of faith, and the line between courage and cruelty became blurry. When Nietzsche attacked what he called “slave morality,” part of his critique was aimed at the way pain had been sanctified, as if deprivation itself were a kind of holiness. I see something like this in the new Stoic communities online.

Hardship is elevated, comfort is suspect, and compassion is weakness.

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius continually reminds himself to accept death, misfortune, and betrayal with equanimity.

But as emperor, he presided over brutal military campaigns and persecutions.

His private reflections show humility and calm, but his reign also demonstrates how easy it is for Stoic acceptance of suffering to become entangled with political violence. Was Marcus simply a man trapped in the necessities of empire, or was his Stoicism a convenient shield against the blood on his hands? It’s not an easy question, and it goes to the moral ambiguity baked into the tradition.

I’ve wondered whether Marcus’s personal philosophy allowed him to tolerate, or even justify, the suffering his policies caused. If death is natural, if pain is indifferent, then what is one more war, one more crucifixion? There’s a dangerous temptation here: to recast others’ pain as a neutral event, when it is in fact the direct consequence of our own choices.

Stoic Sadism thrives in environments that valorize toughness.

In certain entrepreneurial and military subcultures, I hear aphorisms like “embrace the suck” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

I accept that these can be motivational in the right context; but they also create a moral hierarchy in which suffering confers status.

If you have endured more, you are better; if you have not, you are lesser.

The entrepreneur who sleeps under his desk is lauded, while the one who seeks balance is scorned. Pain becomes proof of worth, and inflicting pain on others - by overworking employees, by cutting corners on safety, by ridiculing weakness - becomes perversely justified.

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground rails against the idea that human beings can be improved simply through discipline and suffering. The narrator mocks the rationalist fantasy that man is a kind of piano key, whose behavior can be tuned by the right mix of pain and reward.

His bitter satire feels relevant today, when I see folks on Reddit who’re convinced that hardship is always ennobling.

As if the gulags were fitness centers of the soul.

I don’t mean to argue against Stoicism. I’d consider myself an adherent, as much as I’m adherent of anything. The discipline of focusing on what one can control is profoundly useful, especially in a society so prone to outrage.

But compassion should not be lost in translation.

Seneca himself, though wealthy and complicit in Nero’s rule, wrote eloquently on mercy, reminding us that even rulers should temper justice with humanity. Many modern interpreters of Stoicism (or perhaps, Broicism) seem to skip over those passages. It’s easier to tweet about the indifference of pain than to wrestle with the messy obligations of empathy.

There’s a revealing passage in Epictetus where he warns against laughing at someone’s misfortune. Even if you believe that external events are indifferent, the human being in front of you still suffers. To treat their suffering as unimportant is to miss the entire point. The Stoic ideal is not to delight in others’ endurance tests, it’s to control your own responses while offering solace to those in pain.

Philosophies never remain confined to the private sphere. They leak into policy, into culture, into how we justify systems of power. I worry that Stoic Sadism has found fertile ground in certain political ideologies. When someone argues that poverty is character building, or that the poor “should learn resilience” instead of receiving aid, I hear the Stoicism being twisted into a moral alibi. Hardship is good for you, so intervention becomes unnecessary. The Victorian workhouses operated with a similar rationale: relief should be harsh, lest it spoil the recipient. To suffer was to be morally improved.

Here’s the danger: suffering is never just a neutral event in these cases. It is structured, maintained, and inflicted by policy. To call it “indifferent” is to wash your hands of responsibility.

This is why Stoic Sadism is not only a personal vice - it’s a civic risk.

It allows us to wrap neglect and cruelty in the far more dignified and emotionally abstracting robes of philosophy.

I can’t pretend I’ve avoided this temptation myself. When I first encountered Stoic texts in my twenties, I felt exhilarated by the idea that nothing could truly harm me unless I let it. That mindset helped me through professional failures, alcoholism, depression and deeply personal grief. But looking back, I see moments where I used Stoicism as an excuse to be callous.

A particular moment that still smarts: a friend struggling with depression once confided in me, and I responded with advice about perspective and control, instead of listening. I thought I was being helpful. In truth, I was offering the emotional equivalent of cold water to someone already drowning.

I regret that conversation.

Philosophy, if it makes us worse friends, worse neighbors, worse citizens, is failing at its task. The point of Stoicism was never to stop caring. It was to align care with what we can act upon, and to live with integrity. When I fell into Stoic Sadism, I had twisted its discipline into arrogance.

There are ways to rescue Stoicism from this danger. One is to emphasize the distinction between inner resilience and outer compassion. The Stoics themselves insisted that justice was one of the cardinal virtues. Marcus wrote often about the obligations of community, reminding himself that he was a limb of a larger body. If he sometimes failed to act on those principles, that doesn’t erase their presence.

It’s worth remembering: stoicism can (and should) be read alongside traditions that foreground empathy. Buddhism, for example, also teaches the impermanence of suffering - but pairs it with a relentless focus on compassion.

Does it really matter if a few Twitter Stoics sneer at comfort and praise adversity? I think it does. Ideas filter downward. They shape the ethos of workplaces, communities, even families. A parent who insists that a child’s pain is always good for them may raise someone resilient - or someone broken. A society that treats hardship as proof of virtue may become one that refuses to alleviate preventable suffering. The stakes are not theoretical. They are concrete, lived, and urgent.

Stoicism gave us much-needed tools for self-mastery. But when those tools are pointed outward, when the philosophy is used to justify indifference or cruelty, it becomes something else. Stoic Sadism is not the inevitable outcome of reading Epictetus, but it is a temptation that we’d do well to guard against. The work is to cultivate endurance without losing compassion, to recognize that suffering may sometimes build character but can just as easily destroy it.

When I think of the danger, I return to a simple question: am I using philosophy to make myself more humane, more kind, more decent - or less? The answer, I suspect, will determine whether Stoicism remains a guide to wisdom, or degenerates into a mask for cruelty.