Mind and feeling
Epictetus
What is yours, what is not
Epictetus (c. AD 55–135 · Rome and Nicopolis) — What is yours, what is not.
What actually happened?
There was almost nothing in his room. The one thing worth stealing was an iron lamp, and one night it was stolen. Tomorrow, he told his students, you will find an earthenware one here — a man loses only what he has. Asked whether he was not angry, he said the thief had traded his own character for a lamp. For a lamp he became a thief; for a lamp he became a man nobody can trust. It was a bad deal, and it was the thief who made it. That is not good temper. It is the direct output of the philosophy: the lamp was outside his control, his view of the lamp was inside it, and the only thing that was ever truly his — how he responded — was never once taken.
The dichotomy of control
The Handbook opens with a filing rule. Some things are in our power — opinion, impulse, desire, aversion, in a word our own acts. Some are not: body, property, reputation, office. His claim is extreme: almost all suffering comes from putting something in the second class into the first. The practice is not becoming stronger, it is re-filing every painful thing as it arrives.
In trading you control the size, the discipline and the basis of the decision. You do not control the outcome of this one trade. Stake your feelings on outcomes and randomness will take you apart by instalments.
It is not the thing, it is the view you took of it
What disturbs a man is not the thing itself but the view he takes of it. The event is neutral; the pain is made between the event and the verdict that this is bad for me. When somebody angers you, he says, what angers you is your own judgement — so watch the judgement before you answer. Albert Ellis lifted this straight into rational emotive therapy, and it is the floor modern CBT stands on.
One piece of harsh feedback. Read as I have been rejected it flattens you; read as a free piece of outside information it improves the work. Identical facts, and the verdict in the middle decides everything after it.
The actor and the script
Remember that you are an actor in a play, and the play is whatever the author wants. If he wants it short, it is short. If he casts you as a beggar, play a beggar; a cripple, an official, a private man, the same. Your business is to act well the part given you. Choosing the part is somebody else's business. It is the coldest available handling of an unfair start: neither denying it nor stopping at the protest.
Where you were born, which way the industry is turning, the slot the company put you in — that is casting. What you do at that level is the performance.
Rehearse the loss
When you kiss your child, he says, say to yourself that tomorrow she may die. It sounds cruel and the effect runs the other way: rehearsing a loss in advance blunts the shock when it lands and makes the thing valuable while you still have it. The Stoics called it the premeditation of evils. It is not pessimism, it is inoculating the feeling.
Before a large bet, walk all the way through total failure and the capital gone, and accept it, and then act. People who can carry the worst outcome do not lose their shape mid-move.
How do I use it today?
Take a sheet of paper and write down the three things that hurt most this week. Split each into two columns: what I control, what I do not. Most people find that nearly everything eating their emotion sits in the right-hand column. Then do one thing only — put next week's attention entirely on the specific actions in the left. The value is not in having understood something. It is in seeing, in your own handwriting, what you have been paying for.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.
Never say of anything, I have lost it; but, I have restored it.
You may fetter my leg, but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower.