From the moment we are born, the human experience is rife with loss. It could be argued that no other occurrences in a person’s life shape that person more than the losses endured. Repetitive loss, even minor but repetitive enough, can turn a person inward, creating a spiteful and fearful view of the world. Major losses, especially those which catch us off guard, such as the sudden loss of a loved one, can shatter and reshape our world, often for the worse.
Conversely, overcoming loss can be one of the most powerful and positive experiences in a person’s life. Either way, one thing is undeniable: loss and the associated grief are powerful forces that shape our lives in profound ways, sometimes for the better, often times for the worse. The question then becomes, how can loss reliably and sustainably be put to task for our betterment?
Stoicism provides an answer.
Over two years ago (at the time of this writing), I suffered a loss, one which, I thought, would break me. For a long time, I thought it did break me. As I look back now, I realize I am far stronger and improved for my loss. The details of this loss are irrelevant and would only detract from the point of this story. Suffice it to say, in over five decades on this planet, I have not endured much worse.
At the time, I truly believed I would not survive it, or at least I would not survive as the person I was. I was right; I did not survive as the person I was, but not in the way I presumed. I presumed I would never again be whole. I believed I would never again know focus, strength, and clarity, and that a piece of me was gone forever.
I was wrong with those assumptions, and I owe it to a philosophy I began studying only a few months prior. That philosophy is Stoicism, and it didn’t just carry me through the loss; it empowered me to rise above it. I am better, stronger, and more focused than I was before. Do not confuse that with being less affected by the loss or with no longer feeling it. I still do, profoundly. What changed was not the fact of the grief, but my ability to live, act, and judge without allowing the grief to govern everything else.
I have written much about Stoicism in general and specifically about what I term Strategic Stoicism and its relationship to the warrior-philosopher lifestyle and what it means to be a strategic stoic. However, here the focus is not on Stoic improvement but rather on the very practical application of Stoicism for a very specific human condition: grief and loss.
“Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.20, trans. Gregory Hays
Stoicism is a philosophy and way of looking at the world that places the quality of our lives not primarily in what happens to us, but in the judgments we make about what happens. Externals are real. Loss hurts, obstacles obstruct, illness weakens, people betray, and Fortune can destroy nearly everything we possess. Stoicism does not deny any of this. It denies that these things possess the authority to determine our character, our moral worth, or the quality of our judgment. Between the event and our response stands the rational faculty—the capacity to examine an impression, distinguish fact from judgment, and decide what virtue requires.
“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
—Epictetus, Enchiridion, §5
“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
—Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 13.4, trans. Richard M. Gummere
“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.3, trans. George Long
Stoicism teaches that externals are real, but they do not determine our moral worth. Wealth, possessions, status, circumstances, and other people all belong to the category of externals: things that matter practically but are not themselves good or bad in the Stoic sense. They are material for virtue to act upon.
That includes the people we love. They are not possessions, and their continued presence is never fully within our control. People leave through distance, choice, betrayal, illness, and death. Loss is therefore an external fact, not a moral evil. We cannot command whether loss occurs; we can only govern the judgment and conduct that follow it.
The Stoic does not deny loss, minimize it, or pretend not to care. He refuses to let loss take command of his reason, character, or duty.
“If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.47, trans. George Long
To meet loss Stoically, we must first correct the judgment hidden inside the word loss. When something external leaves us—a possession, a place, a role, an opportunity, or a person—we have genuinely lost its presence. Stoicism does not require us to deny that fact. What it denies is that the external was ever ours in the absolute sense we so easily imagine. We may possess things legally, hold positions temporarily, and share years of our lives with people we love, but none of these are secured by our will. They remain exposed to time, circumstance, choice, illness, separation, and death.
The error begins when temporary possession becomes an assumption of permanence. We quietly convert “I have this now” into “This is mine to keep.” Then, when reality withdraws what it never guaranteed, we experience not only absence but violation—as though something belonging permanently to us has been taken away. The Stoic correction is not to pretend the absence does not hurt. It is to strip away the false claim beneath the hurt: this was precious to me, but it was never mine to command forever.
Epictetus expresses the principle with characteristic severity: do not say of an external, “I have lost it,” but “I have returned it.” The point is not that people are objects or that affection is ownership. It is precisely the opposite. We are given time with things and people we do not ultimately control. We may love them deeply, care for them faithfully, protect them when we can, and prefer with all our strength that they remain. But preference is not possession, and love is not a guarantee.
Stoicism therefore asks us to place everything external back into time. Nothing we encounter is static. Every possession deteriorates. Every circumstance changes. Every relationship exists under conditions neither person can completely command. Every meeting already contains the possibility of parting. Much of what we call loss becomes unbearable because we mentally removed the thing we loved from time and treated its present form as permanent.
The harder and more truthful view is this: what was present was real; what it meant was real; but permanence was never part of the agreement. Gratitude belongs to what was given. Grief belongs to the change. Judgment determines whether grief becomes servitude.
The Stoic does not say, “It meant nothing because it was external.”
He says, “It mattered greatly. It was never mine to keep. And its absence will not take command of what remains mine: my judgment, my character, and what I choose to do now.”
“Never say about anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but say, ‘I have given it back.’ Is your child dead? It has been given back. Is your wife dead? She has been given back. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not this also been given back?”
—Epictetus, Enchiridion, §11
With that principle in mind, consider an event in which we naturally account for time from the beginning: a vacation.
The comparison is not between the value of a vacation and the value of a person or cherished object. It concerns only one feature they share: both exist in time, and our experience of an ending changes when we have understood from the beginning that an ending must come.
Assume you partake in a vacation, a trip to an exotic location, planned and executed to perfection, resulting in wonderful experiences and memories. For this event, time is explicitly planned into the event from the start. You know it will begin, you know it will end, and you know to make the most of it while it is with you because you accounted for time.
When this event ends, we do not say, “I lost my vacation.” Rather, we say, “My vacation ended.” We don’t mourn the loss of a vacation in the same way we grieve the loss of a person or cherished possession. We may be sad the vacation is over, but we do not mourn and grieve it as a loss. We may miss the vacation and events and people we met along the way, but we never frame it as a loss, and we do not despair because we are no longer on vacation. In fact, we often frame it as things gained, e.g., experiences and memories, and we immediately look forward to the next vacation, reminiscing on the old and planning the new.
Why do we experience this ending so differently? Time. We accounted for time from the beginning. We knew the experience would end, so its ending does not strike us as a violation of what we believed reality had promised. Because we understood its finitude from the start, we were better able to appreciate it while it was present. In this realization, the Stoic finds a way to prepare for grief without pretending that grief can be eliminated.
“Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.43, trans. George Long“Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.35, trans. George Long
Now consider a loss you have suffered and place it back into time. Do not deny that something ended. Something did. A presence that mattered to you is no longer present, and Stoicism gains nothing by pretending otherwise. The correction is more precise: what ended was never guaranteed to continue.
A person, possession, role, place, or period of life can be profoundly valuable without being permanent. Its ending does not erase its reality, nor does its impermanence diminish what it meant. What was given existed for the time that it existed. Then circumstances changed, as circumstances always do.
The Stoic task is not to rename loss until it no longer hurts. It is to refuse the additional judgment that a moral evil has occurred merely because something precious was temporary.
In my own case, the loss devastated me because I initially treated the ending as if it had destroyed what came before it. Over time, I learned to see that differently. The presence ended. What it meant did not.
I still carried memory, experience, insight, changed judgment, changed character, and a clearer understanding of what mattered to me. None of those things made the ending good. None made the grief unreal. But they meant that the ending did not have the authority to define the whole.
What was external was never mine to command indefinitely. What remained available to me was what I would make of having known it at all.
That is the Stoic distinction: the ending is real, but it does not erase what preceded it or determine what follows.
The Stoic does not honor what was lost by refusing to grieve it. He honors it by refusing to let its ending corrupt what its presence helped create.
Stoicism does not require the denial of sadness, grief, anger, or loss. Those responses can arise naturally when something precious ends. The error is not that we feel them. The error begins when we allow them to govern judgment, distort reality, or dictate what we do next. Stoicism is not emotional anesthesia. It is the discipline of examining the judgments attached to emotion and bringing those judgments under reason.
That distinction matters most in grief. We cannot always prevent the first pain of absence, but we can examine what we are telling ourselves about it. Was the loss truly an evil, or was something valuable simply temporary? Are we grieving the loss of the person or thing, or the permanence we imagined we had been promised? Are we suffering because of what happened, or because we now regret what we failed to say, do, notice, or appreciate while time was still available?
This is why Stoic reflection on impermanence is not morbid. It is corrective. The people and things in our lives are here now, and time is already carrying them toward change. To remember that is to value them more accurately. Do not wait for absence to teach you what presence is worth.
Live accordingly. Say what should be said. Do what should be done. Notice what is here while it is still here. Treat each relationship as finite, because it is.
Every day you have with someone is one day closer to the last. The point is not to grieve in advance. The point is to leave less unfinished when grief arrives.
Too often we experience time only as a thief, taking youth, circumstances, possessions, and eventually the people we love. A Stoic can look at the same reality differently. Time did not merely take these things; time was also the condition under which we were able to have them at all.
So appreciate what is present while it is present. Use the time well. Do not postpone the attention, gratitude, or action that the present still permits. When the ending comes, grieve what has ended if grief comes—but do not add the demand that reality should have guaranteed you more.
What remains yours is not permanent possession of the gift, nor even perfect command of the memories it leaves behind. What remains yours is what you do with having received it.
“Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.17, trans. George Long“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae), 1.1
Μου λείπεις, αγάπη μου.
