The New Ascetics: How Self-Discipline Became Self-Hatred

Born into slavery in the Roman Empire, Epictetus spent his youth in chains. By the time he died, emperors and senators sought his wisdom. He could have surrendered to bitterness, resentment, or despair. Instead, he transformed his chains into a philosophy of unshakeable inner freedom. His rigorous self-discipline, controlling his reactions, accepting what he could not change, focusing relentlessly on what remained within his power, didn’t diminish his humanity but revealed its highest possibilities. “No one can harm you without your permission,” he taught, demonstrating how constraint could become the very foundation of liberation. 

Today, we’re increasingly asked to embrace a different kind of discipline that seeks not to strengthen the soul but to diminish it, not to expand our capacity for life but to atone for our very existence. This inversion, from self-denial that serves life to self-denial that rejects it, represents one of the most consequential and least examined shifts in modern thought.

Human beings have long been asked to suffer. Religion, philosophy, and politics have each demanded sacrifice in their own tongues. But it’s the soul of the sacrifice that matters more than the act itself.

When Aristotle urged the cultivation of virtue, when the Stoics like Epictetus transformed bondage into wisdom, and when monks preserved civilization through patient labor, suffering was accepted in service of life. Today’s calls for sacrifice, however, increasingly fail this test. They often aim not at renewal, but retreat; not discipline, but denial. Nietzsche warned us clearly about this inversion: when self-denial becomes rebellion against existence itself.

Self-denial has always carried a double meaning. In one form, it strengthens the soul, disciplines desire, and orients the will toward life’s highest possibilities. In another, it festers into resentment, masking a deeper revolt against being itself. The restraint, sacrifice, and hardship may appear identical. But the spirit behind them divides them utterly.

Suffering in Service of Life

The ancients understood this distinction with remarkable clarity. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, spoke of virtue as a cultivated habit: a harmonization of reason and desire, achieved not by force, but by long shaping. For him, the disciplined soul was not one that had vanquished nature but one that had fulfilled it, bringing forth its inherent excellence through practice and restraint. When he spoke of courage, temperance, and justice, he wasn’t describing the negation of human impulse but its perfection. Discipline, for him, was not a punishment of nature, but a means by which nature might flourish more fully.

Even the Stoics, so often misunderstood, did not glorify hardship for its own sake. They embraced discipline as a way of consenting to reality, not withdrawing from it. Marcus Aurelius, emperor and philosopher, didn’t write his Meditations to celebrate suffering but as a manual for meeting it with dignity. “The impediment to action advances action,” he observed. “What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Nietzsche’s Warning

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche diagnosed the ascetic ideal as a dangerous inversion: a way for the weak to transfigure their weakness into false virtue. This way, resentment, envy, and self-hatred could be paraded as moral superiority. Suffering ceased to be a path through life’s demands and became a weapon against life itself. “Rather will man will nothingness,” Nietzsche wrote, “than not will.”

His analysis revealed an important insight: when the will cannot affirm life, it does not simply vanish; it turns against life. Unable to create, it destroys; unable to build, it tears down; unable to transform suffering into meaning, it elevates suffering itself into a kind of false salvation.

The Great Inversion

How did we travel from Epictetus’s chains to our own? The transformation didn’t happen overnight, but through three profound cultural shifts that severed self-denial from its life-affirming roots.

First came post-war prosperity and the guilt it bred. After centuries of scarcity, Western abundance created an unprecedented problem: what to do with success. Previous generations disciplined themselves to survive; we discipline ourselves to atone. The very achievements that should have validated human effort, longer lives, material comfort, and technological marvels, became sources of shame. Prosperity anxiety replaced survival anxiety, and with it came the notion that human flourishing itself was somehow suspect, even sinful.

Second, the secularization of religious asceticism stripped self-denial of its redemptive purpose while preserving its practices. Medieval monks fasted and practiced celibacy in service of divine union and communal good. We kept the fasting, the restriction, the suspicion of desire, but removed the transcendent goal. What remained was discipline as an end in itself, or worse, as punishment for the crime of existing. The form survived while the spirit died.

Third, therapeutic culture, rooted in Freudian assumptions, reframed normal human drives as pathological. Where the ancients saw desires to be trained and ordered, modern psychology sees dysfunctions to be treated. Freud’s mechanistic view of the psyche and his reduction of human motivation to primitive drives and unconscious conflicts replaced the classical understanding of character as something to be cultivated. The soul became a collection of symptoms rather than a capacity for excellence. Self-discipline transformed from character building into damage control.

These forces converged to create our peculiar moment: a culture that practices asceticism without purpose, disciplines itself without direction, and denies itself without hope of redemption or renewal. We retained the forms of ancient wisdom while abandoning its substance.

Modern Manifestations

Today, the signs are familiar. In certain strains of climate activism, the highest good is no longer stewardship but disappearance: to refuse to have children, to shrink one’s presence, and to erase one’s trace. The language is not of cultivation or renewal, but of retreat — of undoing one’s very footprint, as though human existence itself were a kind of original sin.

Education follows suit. Where childhood once meant freedom, exploration, and resilience shaped through trial, it now often means supervision, sanitization, and insulation. Playgrounds are flattened, literature cleansed, and discomfort engineered out of view. What passes for concern is a quiet surrender: a belief that life’s difficulties are best avoided. Yet genuine education does not seek to nullify hardship; it teaches discernment within it. Growth requires contact with the real.

Health culture reflects the same drift. Much of contemporary wellness is built on subtraction, on what must be eliminated, repressed, or feared. Language like “cheat days” casts desire as deviance and appetite as suspect. The body becomes a project of containment. But a richer view of health understands it as cultivation: a harmony of restraint and nourishment, where the body is not shamed into obedience but trained toward vitality. The very same actions — fasting, movement, dietary choice — can emerge from contempt or care. The distinction lies in whether the body is treated as an enemy or an ally.

Even in cultural discourse, human creativity is often cast as transgression. Cities, technologies, and art itself are recoded as violations of some imagined purity. These critiques do not channel Aristotle’s magnanimous soul, nor the Stoic’s alignment with reality. They are animated by something else: a quiet but growing refusal of the human endeavor.

If modernity’s new ascetics succeed, it will not be because they loved the world enough to discipline themselves for its sake. It will be because they despised it enough to demand its diminishment. Self-denial, when severed from an underlying trust in the worthiness of life, ceases to be a path toward flourishing.

Accepting Reality Without Surrendering to It

Trust in life is not naïveté. It is not a casual optimism that mistakes comfort for goodness or assumes that progress is automatic. To trust life, in the deepest sense, is to recognize its tragedy — the certainty of suffering, the impermanence of all things — and to affirm it anyway. Not despite reality, but because reality also includes beauty, love, the fierce tenderness of human connection, the quiet grandeur of nature, and the endlessly renewing capacity for creation.

This is why the ancients linked virtue to orientation, not outcomes. Aristotle’s eudaimonia, the flourishing soul, was not a prize, but a state forged by deliberate habit. One did not train character to escape difficulty, but to meet it in a manner worthy of a rational being. The Stoics counseled acceptance of fate not because it was easy, but because reality, whatever its costs, deserved consent.

Proper discipline is not a retreat from hardship but an advance into it. It prepares the soul for burden-bearing, not by erasing desire, but by ordering it toward higher ends. The disciplined person does not merely endure difficulty; they consent to it, and in consenting, find meaning where others see only injury.

Modern self-denial often resembles a ship that, confronting rough seas, chooses to scuttle itself in protest. To refuse having children, to withdraw from creativity and productivity — these are not noble refusals; they represent abdications of humanity’s fundamental responsibility. Our essential task is not to evade reality but to confront, shape, and improve it, no matter how imperfect or difficult.

A culture that worships absence over presence, that prizes renunciation over creation, is already rehearsing its own disappearance.

The Discipline of Creation

This is not to deny that restraint has its rightful place. A world bloated by consumption and numbed by constant distraction clearly requires limits. The unchecked excesses of modern life — whether through endless consumption, reliance on convenience at the expense of health, or mindless entertainment — cannot continue indefinitely without consequences. Yet meaningful limits must arise from a spirit of affirmation rather than contempt.

Consider two distinct responses to environmental concerns. One perspective affirms: “We must innovate and develop creative solutions to harmonize human flourishing with environmental stewardship, respecting nature as we enhance our well-being.” The other declares: “We must restrict human activities because humanity itself is destructive, and fewer people would be better.” Though both might advocate careful management of resources, their underlying motivations diverge profoundly.

We should therefore approach calls to sacrifice with discernment, remaining wary of practices that offer no constructive outlet. A worthwhile future will be crafted not by those who despise humanity, but by those who care enough to embrace the disciplines necessary to sustain it.

The Daily Choice

I write this not from a height but from within the struggle itself. There is no easy formula for choosing trust over revolt, affirmation over despair. At times, it seems simpler to interpret suffering as betrayal, rather than recognize it as life’s essential texture.

I recognize in myself, occasionally, the allure of withdrawal. Such a retreat might feel comforting, but ultimately it is deceptive.

To relinquish the discipline of affirming life, to exchange the labor of creation for the ease of resignation, is not merely a personal defeat. It is a betrayal of those who came before us, who trusted future generations to build upon their unfinished work.

When Rome fell, it was not the cynics or skeptics who shaped its aftermath. It was the patient builders: monks laboring quietly in monasteries, copying texts by candlelight, protecting the embers of wisdom, safeguarding the possibilities of renewal. Their discipline sprang not from disdain but from a loyalty to life itself.

The ancient philosophers grasped a truth we are in danger of losing: life does not await our approval; it demands our participation. Every act of self-denial confronts us with a stark question: Do I love life enough to shape it, or do I fear life enough to abandon it?

The future — yours, mine, ours — depends upon our answer.