Why Silicon Valley Fell in Love With an Ancient Philosophy of Austerity
Stoicism begins with a wayward merchant. Legend has it that in 312 B.C. a dye salesman named Zeno was shipwrecked in the Aegean Sea. He washed ashore in Athens, read a book of Socratic dialogues, and found philosophical purpose. His brush with misfortune guided him to the idea of self-control in an uncontrollable world. “Man conquers the world by conquering himself,” Zeno is said to have said. He developed a following.
Soon he and his acolytes were convening in the Athenian marketplace on a porch that would become their namesake, the Stoa Poikile, where they were surrounded by others who wished to draw a crowd—fire eaters, sword swallowers, and the like. Zeno’s doctrines of personal mastery would trickle down to Seneca, a sort of philosopher laureate of the Roman imperial period, and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor—and eventually, two millennia later, to an opportunistic writer named Ryan Holiday, himself a kind of wayward merchant.
“At the core of it,” Holiday, a former marketer for American Apparel, is telling me, “I think there’s something in Stoicism that connects to the philosopher mindset”—he catches himself—“or, sorry, the entrepreneurial mindset.” Zeno is “an entrepreneur,” Holiday explains, “a person trying to make their way in the real world.” Then he begins to rattle off the new mantras of the philosopher-entrepreneur: “You’re responsible for yourself. No one’s coming to rescue you. Make the most of this. Don’t get caught sleeping. Put in the work.”
