“Silicon Valley is selling us Stoicism like they sold us yoga”
is a specialist in Greek philosophy. She is a researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is interested in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and has published Stoische Philosophie. Eine Einführung (“Stoic Philosophy. An Introduction,” Reclam, 2019, untranslated) and Plato's Kritik an Geld und Reichtum (“Plato’s Critique of Money and Wealth,” De Gruyter, 2013, untranslated).
How-to guides on Stoicism are a hit with financial and tech entrepreneurs, and especially with self-optimization gurus. How did Marcus Aurelius become the new darling of managers? And can we still speak of Stoic thought when it has been uprooted from its cosmological foundations?
In recent years, there’s been a proliferation of guidebooks inspired by Stoic philosophy. Some of them are top-sellers on Amazon, and they enjoy exponential popularity in big tech circles and on Wall Street. What makes this school of thought so attractive to managers?
Anna Schriefl: I find this phenomenon fascinating. Before, there were maybe five people interested in the kind of research I do – and suddenly the whole world is talking about Stoicism! It seems to me that writing a guidebook based on Stoic philosophy has become a real business model. It is staggering the number of books that appear every week on the subject and that, quite soon after their release, have already been rated by numerous reviews and comments on Amazon.
