# You Cannot Be Just a Stoic

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/practical-stoicism-4733608/you-cannot-be-just-a-stoic
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/practical-stoicism-4733608/you-cannot-be-just-a-stoic.md
Podcast: [Practical Stoicism](https://stenobird.com/podcast/practical-stoicism-4733608)
Published: 2026-05-04T07:19:00+00:00
Episode link: https://stoicism.captivate.fm/episode/you-cannot-be-just-a-stoic
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/c9f8af9a-94f7-4e14-8001-e981cf533e2b.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/practical-stoicism-4733608/episodes/you-cannot-be-just-a-stoic
Duration seconds: 471

## Resource

In this episode, I take aim at what I call “stoa shaming”—the habit of pointing out someone’s failure to be perfectly Stoic as a way of dismissing both them and the philosophy. You’ve seen it. Someone loses their temper, struggles with their weight, or makes a mistake, and the response is: “That’s not very Stoic of you.” On the surface, it sounds like a call to higher standards. In reality, it reveals a misunderstanding of Stoicism itself. Stoicism does not expect perfection from its practitioners. It defines perfection—sagehood—as something effectively unattainable. The Sage is a theoretical ideal: someone who never errs in judgment, never assents incorrectly, and never acts viciously. That’s not us. That’s not anyone. What we are, instead, are prokoptôns—progressors. People in motion. People practicing. This matters because if you misunderstand Stoicism as requiring perfection, then every mistake becomes evidence of failure, and every practitioner becomes a hypocrite. That’s the logic behind stoa shaming. It reduces a philosophy of progress into a brittle standard no one can meet. But Stoicism isn’t a label you “achieve.” It’s a framework you use. Saying “I’m a Stoic” doesn’t mean you embody perfect virtue. It means you’re attempting to move toward it using Stoic principles. That means mistakes aren’t contradictions of the philosophy—they are the condition under which the philosophy is practiced. When someone says, “That’s not very Stoic of you,” what they’re often doing is collapsing the distinction between Sage and student. They’re holding a progressor to the standard of perfection and then using the inevitable gap to dismiss both the person and the system. It’s also, in many cases, a defensive move. If they can frame you as inconsistent, they can ignore what you’r…

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## Transcript

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