It could have been written by one of the Stoics (1). Modern psychotherapies owe a great debt to Stoicism as well. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for example teaches people to think and challenge deeply-held assumptions in order to manage emotions as opposed to being ruled by them.

One critical idea from Stoicism is the following: Suffering results when wishes come into conflict with reality, particularly if your reality is idealistically construed with rose-colored glasses, as if there were no losses, no illnesses, no injustices, and no discontinuities in life. The mismatch between unrealistic expectations and reality creates frustration and emotions of shock, anxiety, sadness, or bitterness. I suspect that the many of the emotions that people experience during the pandemic stems from this clash between the reality as we would like it (i.e., the world is fair, predictable, controllable, and our lives are plannable) and the world as it presents itself to us (i.e., unfair, unpredictable, uncontrollable, with the best-laid out plans falling apart in the blink of an eye).

This is a second key idea from Stoicism: How you view external events (reality) matters more than the events themselves. It is not the events themselves that cause you to suffer but your ideas about the events. Humans are very good at imaging what may happen for example – and worry as a result about things that may never actually come to pass. Put differently, we suffer more in imagination than in reality. In CBT, those ideas that structure our reality are called core beliefs – deeply held believes about the world. Mindfulness-based approaches similarly recognize the power of our thoughts about not only events, but also the relationship we have to our thoughts.

If you put those two ideas together, you have the Stoic blueprint how to manage unpleasant emotions – by avoiding them in the first place. You achieve this feat by accepting the reality of adversity as a part of life–this may be the unique and most practical contribution from Stoicism. If you do not expect to be treated fairly by everybody, you are going to be prepared for the many injustices and avoid becoming bitter. If you know that fate may turn on you, you will at least not be shocked and caught off-guard. To me, Stoic philosophy gets the balance right, between a realistic (blunt) assessment of what can go wrong and how to manage this reality without becoming disillusioned.