I have a notion that both the ancient West and East experienced a chance to align with systems of thought that reject desire, either in part or whole. In the East, that was more successful and stuck around longer. Unfortunately for us, it remained a fringe notion (think how we would react to a modern Diogenes). However, we never completely forgot, flirting with similar ideas from the direction of Christian piety, the synthesis of Eastern thought that occurred in the counter-culture era, and the psychoanalytic frameworks of Lacan, Deleuze+Guattari, and others. Now that our desires are being exploited against us by the tech that mediates our very existence, it makes sense we would seek defense mechanisms. There's trillions of dollars of economic force out there creating, curating, and capturing desire. It's probably worth stepping back and asking how being embedded in that structure is actually affecting us and the degree it's aligned with our innate interests.
As a result, they mostly respond to efforts to reach a lay audience by distancing and criticizing. They are really harsh on the compromises inherent in meeting lay audiences where they are.
Consider the difference between. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultry" and "you shouldn't kill or sleep with your neighbor's wife because both actions cause more harm than they provide benefit, which ought be our goal because the conclusions of such a cost/benefit analysis closely align to most people's natural sense of right and wrong". The former is a statement of morals. If you include the "...because God said so, and God is always right", then it becomes an ethical argument, like the second. The key is arguing the why down to axioms, and defending those axioms as superior to other axioms.
A self-help book like "How to win friends and influence people" provides rules to follow, to achieve a desired outcome, and attempts to explain why the rules work. It doesn't spend much, if any (it's been a while) energy arguing why you should want the desired outcome, or if the desired outcome is actually a good thing.
Not all that relevant to Epictetus, just wanted to add a little linguistic note.
It's wild how the human psyche barely changed since the time of Epictetus.
P.S. If you're a follower of Stoicism, I've been working on a community platform/forum: https://stoacentral.com (there's still a lot of work to be done, but I've been pushing along).
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/epictetus/short-works/geor...
Every student of Stoic Philosophy should read this - https://www.routledge.com/Epictetus-Handbook--and-the-Tablet...
Meditations is also a decent read.
The core idea is simple. You separate what you can control from what you can't. Then you stop burning energy on the second category. Easier said than done, but the framework helps.
I keep coming back to "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor" as a practical companion to the original texts. It's Marcus Aurelius filtered through modern psychology, with concrete exercises instead of just principles.
The danger is treating Stoicism as emotional suppression. It's not. It's about choosing where to direct your attention and energy. That's genuinely useful when you're surrounded by systems designed to capture both.
