A video essay dropped on February 23rd that has Stoicism corners of the internet arguing.

The title is blunt: “Stoicism Is a Scam.” The argument, roughly: what gets sold as Stoicism today (the journals, the courses, the podcast empires, the Instagram quotes over Roman column photography) is philosophical fraud. Not just oversimplified. Fraudulent. A money-extraction scheme wearing a toga.

The creator coined the term “Broicism” for the specific variant they’re targeting: a version of Stoic content aimed at men who want to feel philosophical about pursuing dominance, optimizing productivity, and suppressing inconvenient feelings. The critique lands on real targets. It also overshoots in ways worth examining.

So: is modern Stoicism a scam? And if it’s partly corrupt, what, if anything, is worth keeping?

The Quick Version

The “StoiScam” critique correctly identifies that Stoicism has been commercialized in ways that strip out its hardest and most demanding elements. But it conflates the scam with the philosophy, which is a different kind of error. The classical tradition is substantially intact. It’s just getting drowned out.

What the Critics Actually Argue

Before defending or attacking the critique, let’s be clear about what it’s actually saying.

The “StoiScam” position isn’t primarily that Stoicism is philosophically wrong. It’s making several distinct claims.

Influencer Stoicism is selectively extracted. It keeps the aesthetics (ancient Rome, marble, gravitas) and the discipline-porn (wake up at 5am, don’t flinch, control your response) while discarding the elements that cost something. Stoic cosmopolitanism (the idea that all humans share equal dignity regardless of status) doesn’t go viral. Neither does Stoic skepticism of wealth accumulation. Epictetus’s explicit teaching that pursuing money and status is philosophically confused certainly doesn’t make the cut. You get the armor; they leave out the obligation.

The commercial machinery around Stoicism has an incentive to keep you buying, not to help you become wise. A philosophy that genuinely worked (one that helped you distinguish what matters from what doesn’t, that made you less susceptible to manufactured needs) would be bad for the economy of courses, journals, and premium newsletter tiers. The critics aren’t wrong that there’s a structural conflict of interest here.

The framing of Stoicism as primarily a productivity framework or emotional optimization system misrepresents its actual purpose. Classical Stoicism wasn’t trying to make you perform better at work. It was trying to help you live well in the face of death, loss, injustice, and the limits of what any human can control. That’s a different project. Turning it into a hustle-adjacent self-improvement method is a category error.

Each of these claims has real teeth. None of them are wrong, exactly.

Where the Critique Overshoots

The problem is the jump from “influencer Stoicism is distorted” to “Stoicism is a scam.”

That move requires treating the distortion as the thing itself. It would be like arguing that Christianity is a scam because televangelists exist, or that therapy is fraud because some therapists are incompetent. The abuse of a thing and the thing are different.

The “StoiScam” framing also underestimates what the commercial popularization of Stoicism actually did. Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way, whatever its limitations, sent millions of people to Meditations. A significant number of those people kept going: to Epictetus, to Seneca, to Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, to serious philosophical practice. The pop Stoicism pipeline has real leaks, and some of what leaks through is genuine.

There’s also something condescending in the implication that readers can’t distinguish signal from noise. The same person who bought a “memento mori” coin from the Daily Stoic store might also have done the actual philosophical work. Adults can consume imperfect products and still extract something real from them.

The critics also tend to focus on the most egregious examples (the manosphere-adjacent Stoic content, the sigma-male hustle-philosophy) while treating those examples as representative. That’s cherry-picking. It mistakes the loudest, worst version of something for its center of gravity.

What Actually Got Lost

Here’s where a more honest version of the critique would land.

The commercial Stoicism ecosystem has genuinely deemphasized elements that classical Stoics considered central:

Cosmic physics. The original Stoics embedded their ethics inside a cosmology. The universe is rational, interconnected, and governed by logos, a kind of divine reason that pervades everything. Human virtue was understood as alignment with that larger order. When you strip the ethics from the metaphysics, you’re left with practical advice floating free of any foundational why. That makes it easy to instrumentalize: easy to use “Stoic” discipline in service of goals the Stoics themselves would have found shallow or corrupt.

Virtue as the only good. Classical Stoics held an austere position: virtue (wisdom, justice, courage, temperance) is the only genuine good. Health, wealth, status, pleasure: these are “preferred indifferents.” Worth pursuing when easily available, not worth distorting yourself to get. The influencer version typically inverts this. It uses Stoic discipline in service of wealth and status acquisition. That’s not Stoicism with modifications. It’s Stoicism turned against itself.

The social dimension. Stoics cared obsessively about their obligations to other people. Marcus Aurelius writes about the duty to act for the common good more than almost any other topic. Seneca’s letters are full of admonitions against retreating from community. The image of the lone Stoic sage, hardened and self-sufficient, is almost the opposite of what the tradition actually valorized. Social duty wasn’t an add-on. It was the point.

These aren’t minor omissions. They’re the parts that make the philosophy actually demanding, the parts that cost you something rather than just making you feel tougher.

What Epictetus Would Say About the StoiScam Debate

There’s something almost Stoically appropriate about this controversy.

Epictetus, who was enslaved and understood firsthand what it means to have external conditions outside your control, taught that worrying about how others misuse philosophy misses the point. You can’t control what Ryan Holiday does with Zeno’s ideas. You can’t control whether your neighbor reads Meditations as a self-improvement manual or a philosophical text. What you can control is your own engagement with the material.

The students who came to Epictetus worried about philosophy’s reputation, about sophists distorting Stoicism for applause, got a pointed response: worry about your own practice. Stop performing philosophy and do it.

That doesn’t mean the “StoiScam” critique is wrong to exist. Public criticism of intellectual fraud is a legitimate activity. But it does suggest the critique risks its own form of distraction. Arguing online about whether Stoicism has been corrupted is considerably easier than doing the sustained philosophical work Stoicism actually asks of you.

Which includes examining your own motivations for being in the argument.

A Test Worth Running

If you’re consuming Stoic content of any kind (books, podcasts, accounts, courses), there’s a simple question that cuts through most of the noise:

Is this asking something of me, or selling me something?

Genuine philosophical engagement is uncomfortable. It asks you to examine assumptions you’d rather leave alone. It points out where your priorities are confused. It makes demands. A Stoic teacher who only tells you what you already believe, who confirms that your discipline is admirable and your goals are sound, isn’t doing philosophy. That’s a mirror with a toga on it.

Real Stoic texts are demanding in a way that commercial products structurally can’t afford to be. Epictetus tells students they probably aren’t as serious as they think they are. Marcus Aurelius’s private journals include direct self-criticism: he thought he talked too much, spent too much time with sycophants, wasn’t stern enough with himself. Seneca wrote with genuine anguish about the gap between his philosophical commitments and his actual wealthy, politically convenient life. The philosophy didn’t let him off the hook. It made things harder.

That quality, the refusal to let you off the hook, is what the commercial ecosystem tends to sand off. It’s also what makes the original texts worth going back to.

If the “StoiScam” debate does one useful thing, it might be prompting people to actually read those texts rather than consuming content about them. The Marcus Aurelius vs. Seneca comparison might be useful if you’re trying to figure out where to start. The two thinkers apply Stoicism very differently, and one may fit your situation better than the other.

What to Do With Impure Sources

Most of us came to philosophy through imperfect entry points. A quote on a poster. A self-help book that was 70% good. A podcast that got us most of the way there. That’s fine.

The question isn’t whether your introduction was philosophically pristine. It’s what you do after the introduction.

If you’ve been using Stoic ideas primarily as an aesthetic, as a brand for your discipline and a justification for emotional unavailability, then the “StoiScam” critics have something to say to you worth hearing.

If you’ve been genuinely trying to examine your own thinking, distinguish what’s in your control from what isn’t, and act with something like integrity regardless of how things turn out, then you’re doing the practice, regardless of where you started.

The philosophy doesn’t care about your entry point. It cares about whether you’re actually doing the work.

The daily journaling practice rooted in Stoic reflection is one way to test whether you are. It’s not complicated. Write down what happened, how you responded, and where you fell short. Do it every day. See what you notice after a month. That’s less marketable than a course, but closer to what Seneca actually meant.

The critics aren’t wrong that much of what gets called Stoicism today is a commercialized extract with the hard parts removed. They’re wrong to call it a scam, because the non-commercial version is right there: the actual texts, freely available, aggressively demanding.

The fraud isn’t in the philosophy. It’s in mistaking the product for the thing.

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Philosophy that costs you nothing is usually worth roughly that. The original Stoic texts are free and available online. Epictetus’s Discourses and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations on Project Gutenberg are a better use of your time than most courses on the subject.