[waynecochran]

There must be something to stoicism to have survived for so long. What are the alternative philosophies that would guide a young man today? I gave my son a copy of Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way. I found much if it quite useful. Such a counter to the shallow thinking of today.

[Jach]

Many philosophies, even organized religions, can serve as a guide. If one is looking for a guide, that step of looking already reveals a desire to not just default to either a random walk or wherever you're taken by others; it's that desire more than any particular guide that will serve (or ruin) the individual most. But still, there are lots of alternative guides out there, and many empirically seem at least somewhat useful in various contexts for various people. For some like stoicism I think it's the coherence, or at least the attempt at making a harmonious gestalt of the pieces covering a large context, that makes them feel powerful and useful and not just a series of shallow and disjointed and contradictory thoughts like can be expected of the default civil existence with one trying to figure things out from the environment alone.

Christian tradition can serve even, but it requires quite a bit of study I think to approach seeming coherence, simply passively "being raised in it" isn't enough. Meanwhile things like stoicism, or one of my favorites taoism (see the short Tao Te Ching), can be grasped in a very short period of time, which is all the more attractive. Even if one ultimately doesn't get anything from them or explicitly rejects them, it doesn't take too long to evaluate them and figure that out, and then you'll at least have been exposed to something coherent and helpfully be armed against loving future systems you encounter too much on account of their seeming coherence no longer being novel. That happens I think to a lot of Objectivists for whom Atlas Shrugged (specifically its long philosophical monologues) was their first exposure. But it could also happen to someone reading Walden or the related essays of the time that form an interconnected worldview -- less likely on that one though since amusingly the modern education system's common practice of making snippets of those a bit of "required reading" and then analyzed as just literature or poetry is an amazing defense mechanism against anyone casually coming across them, reading them all, and extracting and applying some of their philosophical points.