A former slave wrote the oldest self-help rule that still works.
Epictetus was born enslaved in the first century and became one of Rome's great Stoic teachers. His core idea: some things are up to us, our judgements and actions, and most things aren't. Peace comes from putting your effort only into the first list.
Epictetus was born around 50 AD in Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey, and spent his early life enslaved in Rome. He was eventually freed and taught philosophy, first in Rome and then, after the emperor Domitian banished philosophers, in Nicopolis in Greece. He wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian recorded his teachings in the Discourses and a short handbook called the Enchiridion.
The Enchiridion opens with what is often called the dichotomy of control. Some things are within our power: our opinions, intentions, desires and aversions, in short our own actions. Other things are not: our body, property, reputation and position, whatever is not our own doing. Much suffering, Epictetus argues, comes from treating the second kind of thing as though it were the first.
This is not a counsel of passivity. The Stoics believed in acting well in the world and fulfilling your duties. The point is to put your effort where it has effect, into how you judge and respond, and to meet outcomes you cannot control with calm. 'It is not things that disturb us,' he wrote, 'but our judgements about things.'
The idea has had a long afterlife. The emperor Marcus Aurelius studied Epictetus. The psychologist Albert Ellis and the psychiatrist Aaron Beck, pioneers of cognitive behavioural therapy, cited Stoic philosophy as an influence, and the well-known Serenity Prayer echoes the same division. Two thousand years on, it remains one of the most practical ideas in philosophy.
Source: Wikipedia — Epictetus · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
