Stoicism has become a religion for immature men
Open any productivity feed and you'll find Marcus Aurelius being quoted between sets. Stoicism has been adopted as the house philosophy of men who've confused not feeling things with being strong — a starter kit of cold showers, 4am alarms, and screenshots about discipline, worn like armour. It reads less like a philosophy than a coping mechanism with good branding: a way to dress up emotional avoidance as wisdom and call detachment a personality.
Which is a shame, because the actual text is almost the opposite of how it gets used. Meditations isn't a manual for dominance. It's a tired man reminding himself, night after night, to be less reactive and more humble — to remember that he'll die, that the people who irritate him are doing their best, that his own judgment is the only thing he controls, and even that not very well. There's no flex in it. It reads like someone quietly losing an argument with his own ego and writing down the score so he'll remember it tomorrow.
The bro version skips all of that, because the humility is the hard part and the aesthetics are the easy one. It's much nicer to imagine you're a stoic warrior-king than to admit you're a person who gets annoyed in traffic and would like to stop.
So no, I'm not defending the gym-caption version — I think it's mostly insecurity in a toga. But I still read the book. Not because it makes me harder, but because it's the most honest thing I own about how little of my own reaction I actually run. That's the test for me: a philosophy that makes you feel superior is doing the wrong job. One that makes you slightly easier to be around is doing the right one.