What do scholars say today's online "Stoicism" gets wrong?

Mostly that it turns a philosophy into a lifehack. Critics who study Stoicism say popular versions lose sight of the Greek concepts the ancient texts rely on and invite people to adopt Stoicism without thinking it through. The revival itself is real: in one year 3,300 people from all over the world enrolled in the online Stoic Week course, run by a research project launched at Exeter University in 2012.

Much of the criticism targets bestselling books. Ryan Holiday, an American marketer and author, became known for marketing Stoicism as a lifestyle and philosophy for modern people. When he spoke at Stoicon, an annual conference for academics and practitioners, in 2016, its organiser, the philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci, said some attendees looked at him and said: "Wait a minute, that's not Stoicism."

James Booth-Jones, a PhD researcher at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, argues that a new group of writers have transformed Stoicism into a lifehack under the guise of ancient wisdom, and that many Pop-Stoic works mislead people into adopting Stoicism without encouraging them to engage with it philosophically. One problem is vocabulary: Roman Stoic texts use concepts developed by the Greek Stoics, such as God, body, soul, impression and breath, which denote something almost completely foreign to what the words convey today.

Not everyone minds. A modern Stoic who helped run Stoic Week, writing on a Queen Mary University of London blog, says that, rather like mindfulness, modern Stoicism has flourished partly by parking the metaphysics and focusing on the ethics, and suggests it is perhaps "a big messy tent". He also reports the psychotherapist Vincent Deary's warning that, taken to an extreme, it could become a toxic political ideology of "sucking it up" when a government or company makes cuts.