Shrinking, Ted Lasso, and the Inner Citadel of Loss

Apple TV has quietly become the home of a particular moral experiment. In Ted Lasso and Shrinking—both Apple TV series, both streaming on Apple TV—the platform has produced two works of popular philosophy disguised as comedy. One radiates hope almost offensively; the other limps forward with grief still bleeding through the bandages. Together, they ask a single ancient question in two different moods: How should a decent person live when life refuses to be decent back?

If Ted Lasso asks, What if goodness worked?

Shrinking asks the harder, more honest question: What if goodness is the work?

Forgiveness After the Fall

Shrinking is built around loss, but not only the obvious kind. There is the death that initiates the story, yes—but more insidious are the secondary losses: trust, self-respect, parental presence, moral clarity. Grief does not arrive politely. It disorganizes the soul and then demands to be fed.

Forgiveness, in this world, is not a feeling that floats in once enough time has passed. It is a practice, and often an ugly one. The show is especially attuned to the asymmetry between forgiving others and forgiving oneself. The former can feel generous. The latter feels dangerous. To forgive oneself is to admit agency—to acknowledge that one could have acted otherwise and did not.

This is where Shrinking becomes the realistic foil to Ted Lasso. Where Lasso treats forgiveness as an aspirational stance, Shrinking treats it as a moral necessity, without which people quietly destroy themselves.

The Socratic Diagnosis

Long before therapy had couches or credentials, Socrates argued that wrongdoing is born not of wickedness but of misunderstanding. In Plato’s Protagoras, he makes the claim that would echo through moral philosophy for millennia: οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν κακός—no one does wrong willingly.¹ People harm others because they do not fully understand what the good is or where it lies. Reform, therefore, comes not through punishment but through education—through examination.

This is why Socrates also insists, in the Apology, that the unexamined life is not worth living.² Shrinking quietly adopts this premise. Its characters do not lack remorse; they lack clarity. One character turns to violence and later seeks punishment through pain, mistaking suffering for accountability. Another dissolves into alcohol, drugs, and distraction, confusing numbness with survival. A third, responsible for a fatal accident after one extra drink, isolates himself from everyone he loves, believing exile is what justice requires.

In each case, pain becomes proof of goodness. But pain without understanding reforms nothing. It merely repeats itself.

Stoicism and the Inner Fortress

Where Socrates names the problem, Stoicism teaches endurance. Marcus Aurelius, writing his Meditations in Greek, repeatedly urges himself to withdraw not from the world, but from dependence on it: εἰς σεαυτὸν ἀναχώρει—retreat into yourself.³ This retreat is not emotional withdrawal. It is the construction of an inner stronghold—the inner citadel—a place where reason remains sovereign even when everything else collapses.

Marcus insists that nowhere is safer: there is “no retreat more quiet or free from trouble than into one’s own soul.”⁴ Shrinking is, at its core, a story about losing this citadel and slowly rebuilding it. Grief breaches the walls. Rage, shame, and avoidance rush in. The task is not to eliminate suffering—that would be un-Stoic—but to recover agency within it. To remain a parent. A friend. A moral agent.

Stoicism does not ask us to feel less. It asks us to feel accurately—to distinguish what lies within our control from what never did.

Boethius and the Wheel That Turns

Boethius, writing The Consolation of Philosophy from prison while awaiting execution, explains why this inner refuge is necessary at all. Fortune, he reminds us, is theatrical and cruel: Fortunae rota volvitur—the wheel of Fortune turns.⁵ What Fortune gives—love, health, stability—she will reclaim. To build one’s identity on these goods is to guarantee despair.

Shrinking understands this without melodrama. One extra drink. One misjudgment. One life altered beyond repair. The show refuses to pretend that good intentions protect us from catastrophic outcomes. But it also refuses the darker lie—that a single error must annihilate the self. Boethius insists that true goods cannot be stripped away. Wisdom, character, the capacity for friendship—these remain unless we abandon them ourselves.

Philosophy That Stays

What Shrinking ultimately understands—and what Ted Lasso affirms from a sunnier angle—is that philosophy was never meant to make us happy; it was meant to keep us oriented when happiness fails. Socrates warned that moral collapse begins not in wickedness but in confusion (Protagoras 345e), and that a life without examination dissolves into drift (Apology 38a). Marcus Aurelius offered a practical response: εἰς σεαυτὸν ἀναχώρει—retreat into yourself—because nowhere is more secure than the rational soul when external order collapses (Meditations 8.48). Boethius completed the lesson by reminding us that what Fortune grants she inevitably reclaims (Consolation of Philosophy II.pr.1), and that only goods rooted in character survive her turning.

Shrinking, streaming on Apple TV alongside Ted Lasso, does not modernize these ideas so much as dramatize them. When grief strips away roles, illusions, and certainty, what remains is the ancient task: learning how to live without confusing suffering for justice, punishment for repair, or loss for moral failure. Philosophy, the show suggests, is not an escape from pain. It is how we stay human inside it.

Bibliography 

1. Plato, Protagoras 345e, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

2. Plato, Apology 38a, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper.

3. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.48, trans. Gregory Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2002).

4. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.3, trans. Gregory Hays.

5. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy II.pr.1, trans. Victor Watts (London: Penguin Classics, 1999).