
Life often feels like an unrelenting grind, a quiet battle of blood, sweat, and time.
Some mornings, you wake up wishing the sun would just stop shining, and other days you feel like a ghost, dragging yourself through the same monotonous routine.
Stoicism—this ancient philosophy that gets treated like a sacred text—sometimes feels like the perfect crutch to lean on.
But then you start asking: When did it become something else?
When did enduring silently stop being a sign of strength and turn into a weak excuse to just lie down and take the hits?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Stoner by John Williams. That book hit me hard—not just because it’s brilliantly written (though it is)—but because it felt like staring into a mirror I didn’t want to see.
The main character, Stoner, moves through life with the same quiet stoicism as a man bracing for a punch.
He endures. He pushes through. He doesn’t complain. But despite all of this, he never truly lives. And that question keeps echoing in my mind: When does stoicism stop being resilience, and when does it turn into a sad form of complacency?
There’s a thin, bloody line between stoicism and complacency, a line that splits open when you least expect it, crumbling away like the last bits of concrete on a dilapidated wall.
One side feels like you’re holding the last shred of dignity in a world that’s gone to hell—like you’re a soldier who’s still fighting, even when everyone else has fled. There’s something noble about that. You’re taking the punches, but you’re still standing, still resisting.
The other side? It’s the moment you stop resisting, when you’ve taken so many blows that you forget why you even stood in the first place.
It’s when the weight of life presses down so hard that you just let it. Maybe you don’t have the energy to care anymore. Maybe you’re too tired to scream. Maybe you’re just too broken to even try.
Let’s return to Stoner by John Williams. It’s about a guy who lives his whole damn life with the weight of a thousand unsung wars on his shoulders, and he doesn’t ever shout out.
He doesn’t throw a fit. He doesn’t even give the smallest hint that he might want something more. William Stoner—he’s the embodiment of stoicism.
But there’s nothing beautiful or noble about the way he goes about it. He just… exists. He’s a teacher at a university, stuck in a marriage that’s as dead as a rotting carcass, a man who quietly accepts everything life throws at him like a punch but never quite fights back either.
Stoner’s life isn’t full of grand moments or heroic comebacks. He’s not a fighter. He’s a guy who shows up, does his job, takes his lumps, and just keeps moving, like the clock never stops ticking, never takes a break.
His wife hates him, his daughter is distant, his colleagues disrespect him, and the one thing he truly cares about—teaching—isn’t enough to lift him out of the muck.
He’s a guy who lives under a gray sky, day after day, never asking for anything better, never daring to wish for more than what’s been handed to him.
He’s not a victim—he doesn’t complain. He’s too proud for that. He believes in stoicism, this philosophy that tells him that true strength is in silence, in enduring without breaking.
But here’s the thing: at some point, it stops being strength. It stops being noble. It just becomes resignation.
It’s a slow death, one day at a time, until one day you don’t even realize you’ve stopped living.
You’re just passing through time, hoping it passes a little faster, hoping something—anything—will change. But it doesn’t. It can’t.
I wonder, as I turn the last page of Stoner, did he choose stoicism?
Did he decide that the world was too brutal and that enduring without resistance was the only way to survive?
Or did stoicism choose him because he was too scared to fight back?
Too terrified to scream when the door slammed shut on all the dreams he might’ve had.
Too afraid to stand up and say, “I want more than this” when the world told him no one cared.
Maybe he was never strong. Maybe he was just too tired to cry out for help. Maybe he accepted his life as it was—like a man lying in the dirt, too exhausted to get up, too broken to run.
That’s the crumbling wall, right there.
Stoicism looks like strength until it doesn’t. And then, when it crumbles into complacency, it looks like nothing at all.
Just a man, drifting through his days, waiting for the end to come, too worn out to care either way.
Explaining Stoicism vs. Complacency to an Apprentice
Alright, let’s break it down for a kid, say, a teenager trying to figure out why he feels like his life is a bag of sand and every day is just another handful slipping through his fingers.
Let’s say you’re playing soccer. Stoicism is when you miss a goal, but you don’t punch the ground or whine. You get up, dust yourself off, and keep running.
Complacency is when you miss the goal and then just sit there on the grass. You don’t really care about the game anymore. You’ll just stare at the clouds and let life pass by, figuring that nothing’s ever going to change, so why bother trying?
Stoicism says, “Get back in the game.” Complacency says, “The game doesn’t matter anymore.”
The Fine Line: Nihilism and Stoicism
Here’s the cold truth: stoicism, no matter how it’s dressed up in philosophical robes, is just as close to nihilism as anything else.
You can parade around in the idea of enduring, gritting your teeth like some kind of hero on a battlefield, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still just a cog in a machine.
It doesn’t matter how you dress it up, how much you talk about virtue or rational control—at the end of the day, it’s all just a slow crawl towards the same destination: the grave.
You sit there, enduring the world, thinking, Maybe this is just what life is—endurance for its own sake. The idea of suffering being noble, of pain being something to bear with dignity.
Hell, even the word “stoic” sounds like it’s meant to be gritted through. But when you strip away the grand ideas and the intellectual masks, what’s left?
Nothing but the humdrum of daily life, the grind that doesn’t care about your philosophy or your damn feelings.
Camus would have a field day with that. He’d laugh darkly and tell you, “It’s all absurd, kid. No matter how you try to push the rock up the hill, it’ll roll back down.”
His eyes would twinkle with the bleakness of it all, the futility, the inevitability. Because, really, what are we doing? You keep pushing that rock because that’s what you do.
Not because it leads to something better or because there’s some cosmic order—no, it’s just the damn rock. It’s the treadmill of existence, where every step is only good for getting you one more step closer to that inevitable end.
So why keep pushing? Why keep fighting? That’s where stoicism gets ugly. It sounds like it’s telling you to be noble, but deep down, it starts to smell like something else—complacency.
That’s where complacency starts looking like a friend who’s been whispering in your ear, telling you to just give in, to let go. It’s okay, it says. You can stop fighting. Just sit there. It doesn’t matter anyway.
Nietzsche didn’t mince words: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
If you don’t have a “why,” though? Well, then you’re just like Sisyphus—pushing your rock up the hill because someone told you to, never questioning why or what for.
That’s the trap, see? You can sit there and act like you’re on some noble journey of self-control, pretending like all this suffering has a higher meaning, but in the end, it’s the same damn rock rolling down every time, and you’re the one who’s left at the bottom, scrambling to push it back up again.
It’s like waiting for a train that’s never coming, like having a conversation with a wall that never answers.
And that’s where nihilism creeps in. Not as some dark, poetic idea, but as the silent hum of reality that whispers: Why bother? What for?
And sure, you might come up with some reasons. You’ll fill the void with something—love, work, purpose—but all of it eventually feels hollow, like filling a bottomless pit with sand. The void doesn’t care what you throw in it. It’s always there, lurking, just beyond the surface.
So maybe you keep pushing because you’re afraid of the void. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re pushing because the alternative—doing nothing, giving in—is worse.
And that’s the thing about nihilism, the real terrifying part—it doesn’t give you any answers. It leaves you with the silence, with the hollow echo of your own existence.
But then again, maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s not about the rock or the hill or even the climb itself. Maybe it’s about staring down the void, knowing it’s there, and still choosing to push anyway.
Even if it’s absurd. Even if it’s meaningless. Because sometimes, that’s all you can do. And maybe that’s the most human thing of all.
The Science: Your Brain on Stoicism vs. Complacency
There’s science behind this, believe it or not. Neuroscience tells us that our brain has an uncanny ability to adapt. When you keep pushing through the grind of life, making conscious decisions, fighting through hardship, your brain rewires itself.
That’s resilience. The more you face adversity and come out the other side, the stronger your neurons fire, building new pathways. But here’s the kicker—learned helplessness is just the flip side of the same coin.
Studies show that when animals (and people) repeatedly face stressful situations without a way out, they stop trying. Their brain rewires to expect failure, and they fall into a state of passivity. They stop trying. They stop thinking. They become shells. And that, my friend, is complacency—the brain’s way of giving up.
Final Words
Here’s the thing about life. It’s dark, it’s cold, and it’s going to punch you right in the gut more times than you’d care to count.
The glimmer of hope isn’t in some grand meaning we find or in some perfect answer we’re supposed to stumble upon. The glimmer is in the choice—your choice.
Do you endure, knowing that the world is full of blood and misery, or do you sink into the quicksand of apathy, convincing yourself that it doesn’t matter?
Nietzsche had it right: you create the meaning. You create the struggle. And in the end, it’s that choice—whether to act, to fight, or to simply exist—that will determine whether you’re Stoic or just… well, stuck in a shitty room, waiting for the walls to close in.
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