Universidad de Guadalajara

Centro universitario de ciencias sociales y humanidades

Lic. En docencia del inglés como lengua extranjera

Academic writing

Professor: Ricardo Zepeda

Christian Daniel Sánchez Rivera

Code 213558191
In this modern times, we live in a society where our environment is constantly stressing us.

People who have over confidence on themselves, impatient civilians who do not respect the

rules because their selfishness does not allow them to think in other people’s necessities, the

tragedies that are constantly happening in this world, such as: poverty, overpopulation,

ignorance, and violence are constantly affecting our daily lives. But there is a philosophical

ideology that does not seem to be disturbed for what surrounds them; they are called the

stoics. One of the main leaders of this philosophical current was Marcus Aurelius that

stablished that we, as individuals, cannot do anything about what is occurring outside

ourselves, but what we can is to control our emotions that come from within. Even if the

world is collapsing, that does not mean that we have to break down along with it.

The purpose of this writing is to talk about the principles that the stoicism possesses

and share my agreement or disagreement with each of the main points of this philosophy,

and at the end I will provide a brief conclusion of how desirable it would be for me to practice

this philosophical current.

The path to follow

In this part of the text I will mention and describe the ideals of stoicism that I agree with. To

begin with, stoics do not fear dead because there is nothing to be worried about. We will

peacefully die, and even if there were pain, very little we can do about it. Death is

unavoidable, it is going to occur no matter if we want it or not. And I agree that we should

not be afraid of death, after all we do not how it feels until it is our time to depart.

Another of the principles that I acknowledge from the stoics is that we do not matter

in our immense universe. Our problems are meaningless if we compare them with the
vastness of this universe. Being worry about what surrounds us will only make us fall in

misery, and again the misery that comes from our problems is futile. So we better not trouble

ourselves with our empty and absurd lives.

We are used to living with high expectations from different people, such as: family,

friends, and classmates. And when those people do not fulfill what we thought they were

capable of, we fall in disappointment. The stoics had a different point of view about this

issue; they stated that we must not expect anything from anyone

Transcending into history has been one of the greatest goals among ourselves. We do

not want to be forgotten and that is why we do our best to be remembered after the day of

our despair, but stoics had a different opinion about being memorialized. They believed that

no matter how big our accomplishments were in life sooner or later we will be eclipsed by

future events. And even if we get to be commemorated for the rest of the eternity, we would

not be alive to know that.

The previously mentioned points may seem that stoics did not want to show any

emotions, but that is only misinterpretations of their philosophy. Stoics were in favor of being

open with your feelings, but they desired to turn the negative feelings into positive ones.

Because we cannot reach inner peace if we do not express our thoughts.

The disagreeable path.

As I established in the last section, Stoicism seem to be the solution for what is constantly

troubling us. However, there are some aspects which I do not agree with. Those aspects will

be discussed in this section of the text.

 What I did not appreciate is that stoicism has this ideal that we can always control

our emotions. We humans are very fragile and it is very difficult to keep everything under

control. It is more an ideal than a reality.

And just to conclude this section, it seemed to me that stoics were very conformist

and mediocre because, for me, it looked that they did not want to surpass themselves due to

that we do not matter in this reality.

Conclusion

As we saw in this writing, Stoicism has several aspects that we can use to improve our life

style. There is plenty of knowledge that we are capable to us in our favor; however, I would

not follow the current completely because I believe that it is not healthy to be associated with

a philosophy.