Finding Growth in What's Meant to Defeat Us

One of the most important distinctions we can make in life is also one of the simplest: there are things within our power, and things that aren't. The problem is that the majority of our anxiety, frustration and suffering is born precisely because we treat what belongs to the second category as if it belonged to the first.

Epictetus begins the Discourses by asking what is actually within our power and what is not, what truly belongs to us is the faculty through which we judge appearances, choose, pursue, avoid, desire, and reject. Our body, property, reputation, position, and the behavior of other people are exposed to forces outside of us and therefore can never belong to us in quite the same way.

There's a fundamental difference between what we can influence and what we can really command. You can influence your health through diet, exercise or certain healthcare practices, but you can never ensure that you won't get sick. You can work to make money, but you can never ensure that you won't lose it. You can communicate in the best possible way, but you cannot determine if the person who's listening will interpret what you say properly. You can prepare perfectly for an opportunity and yet not obtain the outcome you desired.

This means that a lot of what we call "ours" never really belongs to us. These things are exposed to chance, circumstances, the decisions of other people and events that do not depend on us. What really remains ours is the way we judge what happens, what we choose to do in the face of it, and how we use the circumstances before us.

This difference is not as simple as saying, "don't worry about what you can't control." The point is not to abandon entirely what cannot be controlled. You should take care of your health, work, plan, and so on. The point is understanding where "your" part ends, and where what belongs to the exterior begins.

Imagine you need to make a boat trip. You can choose the captain, the sailors, the day to go and try to understand if the conditions are adequate. This is all part of the decision. But after you're out at sea, a storm can still come. At this moment, it's not up to you to decide if the wind changes direction or if the sea becomes less violent. Your responsibility becomes doing your best with the situation you're in.

The error here would be to think that additional worry would give you more power over the storm.

Becoming terrified does not change the wind. Blaming someone doesn't change the sea. Mentally revolting against what's already happening does not offer new possibilities for action. It just adds more pain to a reality that already exists.

This is easy to understand when we're talking about the weather. If the wind is not favorable, nobody believes that sitting there looking at the sky, desperately wishing it to change, will actually change anything. However, some people do exactly this in other areas of life. They want someone to think a certain way. They want someone to stop being angry at them. They want an already decided outcome to be different. They want what happened in the past to never have happened.

They change the object, but maintain the same error: they try to command the wind.

When you're faced with situations like these in life, it's therefore important to think: “what is really mine here?” This does not eliminate uncertainty, but it eliminates the illusion that uncertainty was ever in your hands, and then you can begin to become less anxious, frustrated and make better decisions.

Anxiety shows this in a very clear way. Imagine a musician who plays perfectly well when he's alone. He knows the instrument, knows the song and knows exactly what he's doing. However, when he goes on stage, he begins to become extremely anxious.

What changed? His musical ability isn't gone. What changed is the goal. Now he doesn't only want to play well, but he also wants the audience to like his performance. Playing well depends to a great extent on his preparation and execution. Receiving applause depends on other people. It does not belong to the musician.

As soon as your tranquility depends on the reaction of the audience, you have delivered your inner state to something that does not belong to you. And this may happen constantly in your life.

You can prepare a presentation, but you can't decide if people will be impressed. You can tell the truth, but you can't force someone to believe you. You can make something of enormous quality, but you can't determine if people will recognize its value.

The more you confuse your effort with the final result, the easier it is to go from being an active participant in your life to becoming a hostage of circumstances.

Epictetus is very direct about this. The person who attaches himself to externals becomes dependent on those capable of granting or withholding them. If what you want lies in someone else's hands, that person becomes capable of hindering you. Real power then is not simply the ability to get what you want, but also the ability to not become internally enslaved when what you want is denied.

This does not mean becoming indifferent to everything but what changes is not whether you act, but what you expect your action to guarantee.

There's also another essential distinction to make. What happens and what we think about what happens aren't exactly the same thing. An event occurs, and our minds start to add interpretations. Some of these conclusions may actually be true. Others may be completely false. The problem is that a lot of the time you may not even realize that you've added an interpretation, and then you treat the interpretation as if it was an objective part of the event itself.

Let’s see an example:

A person rejects you: this is an event.
“This is humiliating”: this is a judgement.
“This proves there is something wrong with me”: another judgement
“I cannot bear this”: another judgement
“My life is ruined, I’m useless”: another judgement.

By the time the process finishes, the mind may no longer be responding only to the original event. It is responding to an entire structure of conclusions built around it. Epictetus repeatedly attacks this confusion. He argues that lamentation, bad fortune, accusations, and many other disturbances originate in opinions about external things as though those things were themselves absolute goods or evils.

The point is not that all interpretations are false, someone may really betray you, and a loss may genuinely be grave injustice may have occurred, etc. The point is that an event and the judgement built around it remain two different things, and if you cannot separate them, you cannot examine whether the second actually follows from the first.

In your mind, you have to observe an event and describe only what happened, without adding a judgement. The conclusion that it constitutes an absolute catastrophe, some cosmic injustice, or something you can't bear is a secondary mental operation. This doesn't mean that you need to stop feeling sadness, fear or pain, etc. It also doesn't mean that every single situation is morally neutral or that you should accept injustice without acting. But it means that you need to learn to distinguish the event from the interpretation and everything you start building around it in your mind, because past a certain point this becomes an attempt to command what does not belong to you, and this attempt can become precisely the mechanism through which it controls you.

This separation is especially important when judgement determines the way you act. If something feels intolerable, you may react as if it's actually intolerable. If you believe you desperately need someone's approval, you begin to act in a way that is subordinated to that person. If you consider that losing something, or someone you're in a relationship with, would be a catastrophe, anyone capable of threatening you with that loss can now exert power over you.

This is when the question of control becomes a matter of freedom. Imagine someone who desperately needs approval. As long as that approval is necessary for them to feel better about themselves, the people around them can either offer it or deny it, and they will have power over them.

The same happens with status, money, reputation, recognition, or any other external thing. The more something external becomes necessary for your inner stability, the easier it is to become dependent on those who control access to it. If you live desperately dependent on admiration, reputation or safety, threatening these things is enough to control you.

This demands care in the way we deal with the circumstances we're in. External things may not be entirely in our hands, but the way we deal with them matters. Imagine life as a game of dice: you don't choose what number you get, but you're still responsible for the way you play after the dice have been cast. Your job is to develop the capacity to receive, respond and play correctly with what comes to you.

This way of thinking alters the way we evaluate decisions. Normally, we'd judge a decision by the outcome. If it went well, we think we decided well; if it went badly, we think we decided badly. But a good decision can still produce a bad outcome due to external factors, in the same way that an absurd decision can occasionally produce a good result out of sheer luck. If you confuse the quality of the decision with the quality of the outcome, you never really learn how to decide.

There is a tendency to worry more about what we can obtain than about the quality of the deliberation itself. When the outcome coincides with what we wanted, we congratulate ourselves on our intelligence, but when it doesn't, we may feel defeated even when the decision was perfectly reasonable. The same applies to reputation, for example: what others think about us exists literally only in their minds. You can give them information, you can act well, you can build a good reputation over time, but you can never go inside someone's mind and command them what they should think. The more you need to control what people think, the more you are controlled by what they think, and if this is taken to the extreme, it can be really problematic because you then are paralyzed by this and cannot be functional anymore.

This all forces us to act where action is really meaningful. If you have a problem to solve, work on it. If there's a conversation that must happen, have it. If you can prepare better, do so. If you made a mistake, fix it. If something can be protected, protect it. You get the idea. But after you've done what really belongs to you, recognize also what was never under your authority. The difficulty here lies in not switching the two. Many times, people worry obsessively about what is dependent on others or, in general, pay too much attention to what does not belong to them. They worry about approval rather than the quality of their own actions, or worry about an outcome but not about the process used to get to it. They worry about what someone said about them without considering the possibility that it might actually be true. And it's precisely this inversion that makes them vulnerable.

When you're faced with a difficult situation, the question you must ask yourself is not, "how do I make this happen the way I want?" There is a more fundamental one: "what in this situation really belongs to me?" Maybe it's the decision, maybe it's an answer, maybe it's what you say or do. And maybe everything else belongs to circumstances, other people, or the natural course of events.

Understanding this difference does not mean ceasing to desire outcomes; it means not delivering your inner balance as a guarantee that these results will happen. You can plan without demanding that the future obey you. You can love without imagining that you control the will of the other person. You can suffer a loss without turning it into even more loss. You can act with all possible seriousness without pretending that the world is obligated to respond exactly in the way you desire.

With this, I don't mean that you need to romanticize suffering. There are genuinely painful experiences that nobody would ever choose to live through. This doesn't necessarily mean that "everything happens for a reason." The point here is that even when we can't control what happens to us, there's an enormous difference between being simply crushed by circumstances and learning to use what they demand of us. A difficulty reveals things that a comfortable life can hide. It's easy to think we're patient when nothing tests our patience, or to think we're brave when nothing tests our bravery. Many qualities remain purely theoretical until something happens and demands that they're actually used.

A great part of tranquility begins, then, when you stop trying to command the wind. And when something starts to bother you, you need to start asking yourself what exactly is yours and what is not, turning into growth what is meant to defeat you. The difficulty remains difficult but when you do this, what changes is your relationship with difficulty.