You never know what the stars of MTV’s “Teen Mom” are going to do next. Farrah Abraham, for example, famously got into hardcore porn. Amber Portwood, meanwhile, has got heavily into … Ancient Greek philosophy. Portwood — who’s had more than her fair share of strife since she began starring on the show in 2009 …
You never know what the stars of MTV’s “Teen Mom” are going to do next.
Farrah Abraham, for example, famously got into hardcore porn. Amber Portwood, meanwhile, has got heavily into … Ancient Greek philosophy.
Portwood — who’s had more than her fair share of strife since she began starring on the show in 2009 — told Page Six that she sees her recent 30th birthday as an opportunity to start over with a “brand-new life.”
“I believe that educating yourself is the number one thing to help you grow and move forward,” she said, “So I’m really into philosophers and philosophy right now.”
She says that she admires the Socratic method and that, because of her own commitment to education, Aristotle’s quote that “the roots of education are bitter, but its fruits are sweet,” resonates with her. But the star — whose temper has landed her in many feuds, not to mention in jail — tells us that she appreciates the Stoics most deeply, because of their focus on controlling your attitude to the world.
Portwood says that the second-century Greek, Epictetus, is her favorite philosopher. “There’s a quote from him that really helped me out at the beginning of a lot of situations, which is something like that, ‘There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things that are beyond [the] power of your will.’ To me, that was something I looked at and I was like — ‘Wow.’ Even though you personally know that … for some reason it makes more sense when you hear it from somebody else.”
She said that when she reads a new idea, she tries to see how it would apply to her own life.
“When you hear, like, Marcus Aurelius saying that the best answer to anger is silence, you’re like, ‘Well, s–t — yeah, that’s probably true.’ I sure as hell needed to know that.’ He was a Stoic philosopher as well.”
