The title of this post could be many things. Perhaps “How Stoics Clarified Buddhism,” “How Buddhism Failed Me,” or “How Being a Bad Buddhism Led Me to Stoicism” is a better title. Regardless of how you phrase it, I’ve suddenly found myself “moving on” from being, or trying to be, a solid Buddhist.

Stoicism appears to be Buddhism in disguise, but it’s not.

When I first began reading about the Stoic way of life, a philosophy, I couldn’t help but notice what I would call “Buddhism in plain sight.” Many of the intricate foundations of Buddhism are explained and practiced in Stoicism. No, not meditation. I’ll save that for later. But common ideas about habits, the mind, cause and effect, training, and relationships with people are all Buddhist concepts that, for various reasons, didn’t resonate when applied the “Buddhist way.” However, when viewed through the Stoic lens, these ideas made much more sense.

But, despite some similarities, Stoicism is not Buddhism. Buddhism focuses solely on a few key subjects: Enlightenment, Morality, and Meditation. Enlightenment is the concept that you are reborn into existence, which ultimately causes suffering, and that you can break free from this cycle. The “Eight Fold Path” can be summarized into Morality and Meditation, where you are called to be a moral person and practice concentration on subduing the mind. Now, for me, all of this sounded promising, but the more I examined it, the more it didn’t seem to align with reality (at least for me). Years of meditation wouldn’t help me in the present moment, and the call to be moral wouldn’t magically make me moral. Buddhism, to me, always seemed to demand such an intense practice and transformation that it appeared out of reach for simply becoming the best version of myself.

Which is where Stoicism comes in. While Buddhism sought to find Enlightenment, something I wasn’t particularly concerned with, Stoicism aims to simply help you become the best person you can be in the present moment. Where Buddhism called me to Enlightenment, Stoicism called me to simply improve myself. And as time revealed, that was precisely what I had been seeking.