Day 5 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
No one in the Stoic tradition makes the philosophy more credible than Epictetus.
Anyone can write about freedom from the inside of a palace.
Marcus Aurelius did it, honestly and with self-awareness, but he did it as emperor.
Epictetus wrote about freedom from inside slavery.
He had no property, no legal personhood, no control over where he lived or what he did or who owned him.
He couldn’t vote, couldn’t travel freely, couldn’t protect his own body from harm.
And from that position, he argued, convincingly, that he was free.
Not free from circumstance.
He wasn’t confused about his situation.
He was free in the only domain that, for him, actually counted: his own mind, his own values, his own response to what happened to him.
“Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” — Epictetus
That’s not passivity.
Epictetus wasn’t arguing that slaves should accept their chains philosophically and not fight for liberation.
He was arguing for something more fundamental: that even when you cannot change your circumstances, you retain authorship of your inner life.
And that inner authorship is the foundation of everything else.
His lectures were recorded by his student Arrian, Epictetus himself never wrote anything down, and collected in two works: the Discourses, which are the full lectures, and the Enchiridion, which is Arrian’s condensed handbook of the most practical teachings.
The Enchiridion is the place to start.
t’s about the length of a long essay, and it reads like someone giving you, calmly and without sentimentality, the exact advice you need.
Some of it is bracingly hard.
“Never say of anything, ‘I have lost it’; but, ‘I have returned it.'”
That’s Epictetus on grief.
If a child dies, you haven’t lost them, you’ve returned them to wherever they came from.
If a possession is taken, you’ve returned it.
You were always a temporary steward, not an owner.
This sounds cold until you sit with it and realise it might be the only way to grieve without being destroyed by grief.
“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.”
This, the separation between event and interpretation, is the ancestor of every form of cognitive therapy that exists today.
The event is neutral.
Your judgement about the event creates your experience of it.
Change the judgement, and the suffering changes shape.
For anyone who has gone through the initial period of becoming vegan, when you suddenly see what’s happening to animals everywhere you look, and the world seems drenched in cruelty that no one else acknowledges, Epictetus is both difficult and useful.
He won’t soften what you’re seeing.
He’ll tell you clearly that the suffering of animals is real, that justice demands a response, that your discomfort is appropriate.
Then he’ll also ask: is your distress serving the animals, or only consuming you?
Is your anger changing anything, or just making you miserable?
The Stoic answer is to feel what you feel, fully, honestly, and then to channel it into what is actually within your power to do.
Not to suppress it.
Not to perform outrage for an audience.
Not to carry it around like a wound that never heals.
To feel it, understand it, and act from it as cleanly as you can.
Epictetus lost everything anyone could take.
He kept what no one could.
That’s the lesson he lived, and it’s the most credible version of it anyone has offered.
Practice for today
Read the Enchiridion, Chapters 1–10.
Note where Epictetus sounds too harsh, too demanding, too cold.
Sit with that discomfort rather than resolving it.
Then write: what’s the hardest thing he asks of you? Is he right?
Cameron is a prolific blogger with a number of sites where he shares his thoughts on a wide range of topics.
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