“You’re too much in your head. Try living from your heart.” I’ve heard this gentle rebuke more than once. Diagnosis and remedy, delivered in a single phrase. And each time, something in me recoils. The suggestion that I should set thought aside and dwell instead in pure feeling leaves me uneasy.
What kind of culture insists on such a division? I suspect one increasingly uneasy with complexity. A culture that no longer knows how to think and feel at once, and so demands that we choose. And more often than not, it chooses sentiment.
Nowhere has this tendency been more evident than in the recent UK vote on assisted dying. The arguments in favour were deeply emotional, stories of suffering, of autonomy, of the right to choose. It was clear from the debate that many supported the bill because they genuinely wished to reduce suffering. Their compassion can not be doubted. But compassion alone is not a reliable guide. Without deeper reflection, it risks becoming a form of sentiment, persuasive but unstable. History offers more than one example of well-intentioned mercy that, unexamined, gave cover to cruelty.
My heart sank when I heard one MP describe some opponents of the proposed law as religious and out of step. He said these people were intent on imposing their religious views on others. His remarks echoed comments made by television personality Ester Ranzen when the bill was debated back in May. But many opponents are not religious. They resist from a conviction that dying is not something to be removed. It is not a medical error to be managed.
The language of dignity was, of course, everywhere. I lost count of the number of MPs who wanted to give dignity to the dying. But dignity is not a legislative offering. It is not something we give. It is something we bear. (I have written elsewhere on the moral and emotional complexities of assisted dying, and the quieter strength that can emerge as we journey towards death. You can read that here).
The philosopher Martin Heidegger warned us about our deepest anxiety. It is not the fear of death as an event. Instead, it is the fear of what death reveals. Death shows that our existence is finite, unscheduled, and ultimately beyond control. To live authentically, he argued, is to live with death in view, not to flee from it. But flight is precisely what we are witnessing. A culture that elevates emotion above reflection, that urges us to feel rather than think, will struggle to hold complexity. It will certainly struggle to consider Heidegger’s idea. And nowhere is this more visible than in our attitude toward dying. We try to manage the process. But, when we try to do this, we do not conquer it. We merely disguise our discomfort. We flee not from dying itself, but from what dying forces us to see.
That flight was on full display in last week’s vote. To my mind it marked something significant. Not the arrival of choice, as its advocates claimed, but an attempt to “disappear” dying itself. We are no longer willing to allow dying to unfold. We want to have it managed, quietened, swept aside. This is not compassion. It is concealment. A culture unable to face finitude begins to look for exits, not for meaning.
In this light, what occurred in the House of Commons last week was not a moral advance. It was a moral retreat. Moreover, death, once called the most democratic of institutions, is becoming less so. The inequalities of race, wealth and loneliness that structure our society will not vanish with this law. They will show up in its outcomes. This new right to die will come with many costs. And as often happens, these burdens will fall on the already marginal. The poor, the isolated, and the unheard will be affected.
In moments like this, it is not surprising that Stoicism returns. It always has, in times of fracture. In the turbulence of post-Alexandrian Athens, it was shaped by civic despair. In imperial Rome, as republican ideals faded and public life grew theatrical, Stoicism moved inward. Figures like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius wrote not in ages of certainty, but in eras of loss. Their words did not flatter the times. They offered an ethic for what to do when the forum no longer holds. You govern what you can from the inside.
This inner sovereignty becomes more necessary as outer forms deteriorate further. And yet, even this is vulnerable to distortion. In our age, enter the Tate brothers. Their caricature of Stoicism, built on aggression, emotional suppression and ego masquerading as discipline, is not an aberration but a symptom. They are not the cause of our moral drift. They are its inevitable expression. In a culture that no longer values virtue, Stoicism becomes performance.
We have seen this before. In late Rome, Stoicism began to hollow. Its ideals remained, but they were performed rather than lived. Seneca, who served under Nero and understood the seductions of proximity to power, warned of those who spoke one way and lived another. Philosophy, he wrote to Lucilius, teaches us to act, not to speak. In another letter, he rebuked those who played at simplicity while building monuments to vanity. Observe yourself, he said. If you eat frugal dinners but build a massive, ostentatious house, your philosophy is hollow. Virtue, he insisted, was not decorum but discipline.
Today’s pseudo-stoicism follows the same arc. Its performance is loud. Its motives are commercial. Its ethics are thin. And yet, it is not entirely foreign. It belongs to the same cultural collapse as the sentimentalism that drives the assisted dying campaign. Each promises to resolve discomfort, whether through control or escape, but neither asks us to endure the human condition. One offers power. The other offers comfort. Neither teaches courage.
One further thought lingers, quiet but unsettling. In legalising assisted dying, the state has crossed a particular line. It has entered the terrain of permission, the authority to approve a death that does not arrive on its own. That is no small step. Once the state grants itself that power, what prevents it from insisting that someone live one day? This could happen even when death would come naturally. It could also occur when continued existence no longer serves the person’s dignity or desire.
Imagine an elderly patient whose body is failing. They wish to stop treatment and let death come. However, they are pressured legally or institutionally to continue interventions deemed standard. Or a terminally ill person urged to participate in clinical trials, not for their own benefit, but for data. Or families denied the right to withdraw life support from a loved one. Maybe because a hospital protocol or a funding body refuses to approve death in such circumstances.
Last week’s vote sees the distinction between what is given and what is governed erode at an alarming pace. In such a world, life is no longer cherished. It is administered. Death is no longer awaited. It is arranged. The line between mercy and machinery blurs. The danger is not overt cruelty but quiet, unthinking banality. A society that forgets what death means will not be far from forgetting what life is for.
The ancient Stoics held dying close. Barea Soranus, a senator under Nero, willingly walked into his own death. He refused to flatter the emperor. He showed justice to those Nero had attacked. He maintained a quiet independence of judgment. That was enough. He was sentenced to death for his bearing alone. His end was not dramatic, but deliberate. He did not resist, nor did he perform. He accepted death with the same composure with which he had lived.
Seneca was even plainer. Death is not an evil, he wrote. It is the one law to which all of nature is subject. And in one of his more austere moments, he added: “The person who fears death will never act freely. The person who dies every day has overcome death.” This references a common Stoic practice of meditating on one’s own death daily.
These are not the words of people fleeing reality. They are the voice of a tradition that calls us to live well in full view of death, and to seek clarity in the full presence of feeling. No performance. No retreat into abstraction.
When future generations look back on this moment, what will they see? That we were a compassionate society? I doubt it. They will see the health inequalities. They will see the loneliness of the dying.
Will they see that we befriended the infirm, the isolated, the ill? No. They will see very little of that.
Will they see that we invested in a hospice movement where the dying were gently held, where they were supported to live fully until the end, and where their dignity was honoured from beginning to end? No. They will see a movement that struggled for every cent, surviving more on the goodwill of the few than the generosity of the many.
But they will see this: that we passed laws to make death more convenient, more presentable, easier to ignore. That we silenced the mind in favour of feeling, and buried feeling beneath cold calculation, unwilling and perhaps unable to hold both at once. They will see that we mistook management for meaning, and called it progress.
Yet amid all this, perhaps they will also see that some chose another way. That enough people turned not outward for control, nor upward for escape, but inward and deeper. That they discovered a form of sovereignty rooted not in conquest or concealment, but in the difficult and noble work of being human.
Consilium 
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