Earlier quoted context omitted.
>like bodybuilding, nootropics, hackathons and life-hacks, it presents rigid, rationalized mastery of the self as both desirable and achievable. This is a good observation. It reminds me of some kind of digital protestantism on steroids. The same kind of displayed humility, work obsession and so forth. I think it's very self-aggrandising in a way.
So you want to live “according to nature?” Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power – how could you live according to this indifference? Living – isn’t that wanting specifical…
The most helpful parts of Stoicism for me are understanding and accepting that awful things might happen I can't do anything about, the hedonic treadmill exists and a little more money, a car, a speedboat, or whatever I currently desire probably won't make me happy in the long term.
If I spend a week or a month in tatters over something minor, I can learn to adjust myself rather than trying to change the world to fix my own head. Long-term happiness is a mixture of changing the world to fit my goals and changing my goals and what I demand from it to fit the world - to learn that I cannot get everything I want.
Where I disagree with Stoicism is the ideas that my goal should be to optimize myself to some sort of perfection, and that I can ever have perfect control over myself mentally. My thoughts themselves live inside a biological brain which is affected by its construction, genetics, hormones, and many other physical influences. Beyond this, the idea that any specific thing must be the moral goal of all persons seems, as it is put here, like a gross presumption. But I never went in that far to the philosophy.
What does strike me, though, is your identification of various "self-improvement" techniques together under the Stoic banner - I've recently been confronting aspects of my personality in that sense and it made me jump a bit to read your description - it makes me think there is a bit of "There" there I should reconsider.