The Ancient Art of Letting Go
In an increasingly anxious world, Stoicism has gained a cult-like following. But Buddhism offered a similar solution long ago.
Sumanth Murthy, an AI scientist in Cambridge, U.K., believes one philosophy helped raise him. “I’m the son of a single mom, a widowed mom,” Murthy told The Juggernaut. “My mom didn’t know how to raise a boy.” But when, as a teenager, his uncle handed Murthy a book by Seneca, slowly, the ancient text gave him the wisdom he thought could only come from a father. “South Asian dads have this reputation of not being emotional, often to the detriment of their children,” he reflected. “But there are some qualities that are good — being steady in the face of crisis or adversity. Stoicism taught me that.”
Murthy isn’t alone. In 2020, as a pandemic-stricken world grappled with uncertainty, people turned to an unlikely source of comfort: a Roman emperor’s private journals. Sales of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations jumped 28% in mere months. Across social media, tech entrepreneurs and self-help gurus quoted Stoic wisdom alongside productivity tips. The philosophy that once counseled emperors and their subjects alike became a blueprint for corporate success, its messages of resilience and self-control repackaged into bestselling business manifestos.
Yet, hundreds of years before Marcus Aurelius, another philosophy had already developed strikingly similar insights about human suffering. Buddhism, which Siddhartha Gautama founded in India as early as 600 B.C., taught that peace comes not from controlling external events but from mastering our reactions to them. This core insight was radical for its time. Yet, only one school of thought is having a modern resurgence.