When people think of modern day Stoics, they think of some of the world’s greatest influencers such as Nelson Mandela. However, the first person that came in to my mind when I thought of a Stoic was my father.

My father is a surgeon who works with cancer patients. Despite the fact that my parents are in a fairly stable relationship, I’ve probably lived with my father for slightly more than half of my life, and I’ve seen him far less than that. His occupation forces him to live within 15 minutes of the hospital we works at, and since my school took an hour to commute, we lived in different cities.

The reason I call him a Stoic is precisely because of his stoic attitudes towards his life. He doesn’t value emotional struggles; in fact, he believes that they do not exist. He likes to train his physical body so that he can endure long surgeries that sometimes go on for more than 10 hours. During the summer, he climbs mountains. He has trained so much that he climbs the tallest mountain in Japan in 3 hours, where a typical person would take 5 hours. When the mountains close during the winter season, he participates in full marathons almost every two weeks.

I believe that one reason my father became the way he is now is because he has faced patients for the past 30 years who are in a life-or-death situation. Cancer has a high recurrence rate. If it recurs, your chance of survival becomes slim. He must have suffered greatly when he couldn’t save some of his patients. The repeating struggles would have led him to see emotional difficulties as meaningless, in order to stop suffering.

Having lived the way he has for 47 years, my father seems to endure any hardships that come along the way without having emotional difficulties. Before learning about Greek philosophy, I had always thought of him as a respectful but cold figure, although I did have an idea of why he lived that way. Now I fully understand that it is just his way of trying to lead a happy, worthy life.

The question of whether I agree with him about his vision of an ideal life is a different matter, though.