It is hard to doomscroll these days without encountering the timeless words of wisdom from the Stoics, who appear to be having their reappropriated moment in the cultural zeitgeist. In more Gen-something friendly terms, it is like streaming a track with a billion listens without realizing it is a heavily sampled tribute, or an outright derivative of something older and better that never needed to be remade. I think of this as the Weezer-covering-Toto effect. Polished, sanitized, and ultimately soulless renditions that replace the original in the collective memory of a new generation.
So what actually makes it through the gauntlet of remembrance? Now that I am an ‘uncle,’ I find myself opining that much of what is popular today does not feel built for the long haul. It makes me wonder what history actually chooses to preserve, and why. Does it save what was best, what was most common, or what was most profound? Maybe it’s less about the ideas themselves and more about how they made it through history’s chopping block. To be fair, Books 2, 4, and 6 of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations are epic reads, but when we look more broadly at the survivors, perhaps we are blindly guided by the ancient remnants of adverse selection.
If you could envision all of recorded humanity, it would resemble a landfill of beliefs, stories, and systems that arrived and vanished with equal fury. We do not know what was lost to history, so we treat the ideas we have as absolute truths when they are really just the ones that survived the long march of time. In the Indian worldview, we might distinguish between shruti, that which is revealed and eternal, and smriti, that which is remembered and shaped by context. We often mistake the surviving philosophical fragments for shruti, as if they were divine laws, when they are actually the ultimate form of smriti. We aren’t hearing the original song; we are listening to a low-bitrate file of a tribute band, stripped of the frequencies that make life rumble.
It is estimated that roughly 120 billion people have ever lived. The world then has played host to untold millions of thinkers, texts, languages, wars, fires, pandemics, and ideologies. The odds therefore are likely heavily stacked against the survival of most things. Those that endure seem to benefit from narrative simplicity and, most likely, a tremendous amount of dumb luck. “Amor Fati” thrives on Instagram sandwiched between kettlebell workouts and remote work retreats. Ryan Holiday sells it as modern gospel in The Daily Stoic, even peddling a coin emblazoned with the term so you can remind yourself to embrace your fate while waiting in line for a flat white. It fits neatly into today’s attention economy because it is clean, minimal, and “doing the work” for you, making it a comforting voice of reason during a CBD face misting.
Contrast that with the philosophies that did not make the canon. The Cyrenaics, who believed the purpose of life was immediate physical pleasure, likely stayed at the punch bowl too long to build a lasting legacy. Their ideas may have been compelling over a long weekend in Goa, but bacchanalian hedonism has an inverse relationship with staying power, or so I’ve been told. Then there were the Cynics, led by Diogenes, history’s original internet troll, who lived in a ceramic urn, defecated in public, and carried a lantern in broad daylight looking for an honest man. He practiced a form of feral nudity and anti-civility that was brilliant but fundamentally incompatible with institution building. We do not remember the philosophies that championed vagrancy although we can always hope for mean reversion.
This selection bias in philosophy mirrors the selection bias we see in the modern world. I am reminded of my colleague in India who, upon landing in New York, insisted on a detour to Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights to buy Indian spices to bring back to Bangalore. He loaded a shopping cart full of elaichi and channa, convinced they were superior because they were destined for a market with deeper pockets. He treated the ‘Export Quality’ stamp as a guarantee of authenticity, failing to realize that the best spices actually never left the neighborhood. We do the same with thoughts by importing bite-sized philosophical nuggets as productivity hacks while forgetting that a deeper and more textured experience is already being practiced across every dusty chowk in India.
Nowhere is this shadow intelligence more visible than in the workshops that the formal world has forgotten. Outside of Meerut, there is a cluster that manufactures medieval gladiator armor for film sets and museums. It is a world of blacksmiths and metal artisans producing chainmail and helmets off the grid. When you walk those lanes, you see and hear the cacophony of hammers hitting steel by men operating through tacit knowledge and mastery who do not need coins to remind themselves of Amor Fati. The reality is lived every time the power goes out mid-weld or a supply chain collapses.
I once visited a gherkin factory in rural Karnataka, down a long unmarked road where pickles were being jarred and white-labeled for Walmart and other global brands. From the outside it was a large, nameless shed with corrugated roofing. But inside, the equipment was complex and modern with stainless steel tanks and conveyor systems sorting cucumbers by size. There were barrels stacked to the ceiling and lines of brine-filled jars being capped and boxed, all while administered by a raised control center that looked like central command on the USS Enterprise. Labels were being printed for export in countless languages across as many brands with no hint of the global supply chains they were feeding into. I couldn’t believe something at that scale existed, in that place, with that level of precision. It struck me then, as it does now in Meerut, that there is an entire economy in India legible only to those who know where to look. And even then, just barely.
India is an endless study in layers of intelligence that will likely never be known because it doesn’t broadcast on a frequency that the modern world is tuned to hear. It’s not so much reading signals differently as listening to the hum of things working without expecting an explanation. Buried in the heat and dust and signal lag, you begin to understand that the volatility the Stoics feared is not something to be managed or transcended, it is simply how things are. It is the background noise of daily life.
If we’re honest, most of what we surround ourselves with is just the stuff that was light enough to float to the top. It’s the “Export Quality” version of reality; cleaned, polished, and easy to ship. But visibility isn’t the same thing as value. Real intelligence doesn’t feel the need to introduce itself at a networking event or sell you a commemorative coin. The composure people search for in packaged ideas is already being practiced, without language or attribution, in places that never needed to explain themselves in the first place.