A note on framing: I’m not a philosopher or a psychologist, and this piece isn’t a clinical guide. If you are dealing with persistent low mood, anxiety, or distress, that is a matter for a GP, therapist, or counsellor — not for a Stoic essay.
There is a small experiment I have been running on myself for a while now. When something snags me during a day — a message that landed wrong, a shot that lipped out, an email I’ve been waiting on that still hasn’t come back — I try to ask what part of the snag is actually mine. Not what caused it. What part of it, right now, is in the pile marked mine to move. Usually the answer is smaller than I want it to be. The thing itself has already happened, or belongs to someone else’s chair. What’s left is how I am about to carry it for the next hour.
That small experiment isn’t new. It’s about two thousand years old, and it comes from Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher who was born a slave in the Roman Empire and later taught in Greece. The opening line of his handbook is: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions.” Everything else — your body, your property, your reputation, other people’s opinions of you — sits on the other side of the line.
This is what modern readers call the dichotomy of control. The reason it survives, I think, is that it names the mistake most of us are making without noticing. We pour our energy into the second pile — the not-ours pile — and then wonder why we feel so disturbed. Epictetus’s line, at its bluntest, is that peace doesn’t come from getting more of what you want. It comes from wanting only what is already yours to give.
Notice what that is not. This isn’t optimism, or “look on the bright side,” or the modern advice to reframe every setback as an opportunity in disguise. Optimism is still oriented outward — still hoping the world will hand back a particular shape. Epictetus is asking you to stop asking the world to hand anything back at all — not because the world is bad, but because it isn’t your address to write to. If you suppose that what belongs to others is your own, he warns in that same opening passage, “you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed.”
I’ve read Epictetus more than once, and the line that has stayed with me sits a few sections later. He writes: “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.” That is not a resigned line. It isn’t quiet surrender. It’s a very specific instruction — align your wanting with the ground you actually stand on, and the disturbance goes with it.
It’s easy to hear this teaching in the flat version and get it wrong. Michael Tremblay, a Stoicism scholar who completed his PhD at Queen’s University, has argued that even the phrase “dichotomy of control” is a little misleading, because Epictetus never quite meant control in the everyday sense. Tremblay puts it this way: “My favorite way to think about it is in terms of what something external to you can stop.” Your temper is yours because nothing outside you can stop you from being calm; the thing in the way is your own character. A soccer match, or a promotion, or a specific reply from a specific person is not yours in the same sense, because plenty of things external to you can put an end to it.
I like that reframe because it takes the pressure off. If you read Epictetus as “you should be able to switch your feelings off,” you’ll fail immediately and decide the whole thing is idealistic nonsense. If you read it as “the things that depend on you are your responsibility, and the things that don’t are not,” a lot of contemporary suffering shrinks to something closer to its real size.
I’m not a philosopher, and I’m not a psychologist. I read this stuff and try it in my own week. But the noticing does something. The awkward email you sent, the piece someone else didn’t read the way you meant it, the outcome of a meeting you weren’t in the room for — you can pick these up all day and carry them around, and nothing you do with them adds up to anything, because they aren’t the pile marked yours. What is yours is smaller and quieter: what you say next, whether you write back or leave it, the tone you take, and the assent or refusal to the story your mind is trying to hand you about what any of it means.
Wanting a specific reply from a specific person is renting your peace to them. Wanting to have shown up as yourself today, and doing that, is spending your own coin. It doesn’t feel like a huge shift on any given afternoon. It feels like a nudge. But nudges add up, and after a while the map of what you are actually trying to move looks smaller, more honest, and less exhausting.
Epictetus didn’t promise this would be easy, or quick. He was clear it was a lifelong exercise, closer to the ground than any single insight. In my own weeks I still fail at it constantly — I still refresh the inbox, still rehearse the imagined reply, still spend an hour turning over a meeting I wasn’t in. The frame doesn’t stop any of that. It gives you somewhere useful to put your attention once you notice.
