[K0balt]

The “bad stoicism “ examples are indeed “bad”. They are in fact completely antithetical to the stoic ethos.

The “bad” in actual stoicism lies in a common misinterpretation of classical stoic works as a result of missing context.

The context is that Epictetus et al wrote those works in a time when people were normally ruled by “passions” and did not live under the same expectation of self control and rational action that is expected (rightly or not) of the average person in the modern day.

This contextual disparity leads some people to think that stoicism means to completely abandon emotion and emotional self care. This is not only untrue, it can be deeply harmful.

Classical stoic works need to be read within the passionate context within which they were written to be properly understood.