There’s no question the Stoics were tough. Marcus Aurelius lived with chronic pain. Epictetus did too after having made not so much as a sound when his master cruelly broke his leg. Both Seneca, who suffered with asthma his whole life, and Cato bravely faced painful deaths…and countless other Stoics endured exile and loss and injury.

So yes, the Stoics were tough.

But people get this philosophy wrong when they think that to feel pain (or want to avoid pain) is weak. The writer Derek Thompson, responding to a certain masculine antipathy toward COVID-safety protocols early on in the Pandemic dubbed this “COVID stoicism.” Now, he happened to be conflating Stoicism the philosophy and stoicism the word, but that’s sort of the point. Lots of Stoics do that too.

They don’t want to look stupid…so they won’t wear a helmet. They don’t want to acknowledge trauma or emotion…and just stuff it down. They don’t want to be vulnerable…so they close their hearts to other people. They don’t want to admit they made a mistake…so they keep on making it. It’s ironic–a fear of looking weak ends up making them very weak.

We all do some version of this. We’re too tough for our own good. Too tough to change. Too tough to protect ourselves. Too tough to get help. Too tough to learn. Too tough to grow. Too tough to be strong.

And we inevitably grow weaker as a result. Maybe not so weak that we become vulnerable to the whims of Fate, but certainly enough that we risk never achieving our full potential and doing things we were put on this Earth to do.