Accept, or resign oneself?
On the axis: Scope of action · a wrong suffered
Where is the line between serenity before the inevitable and passivity, even a convenient excuse, before a wrong that effort could put right?
For two years you carried a project on your own back: the ideas, the deep work, the evenings no one counts anymore. When recognition comes, your manager presents its merit to the leadership as if it were his own, and the promotion that should have been yours goes to one of his close allies. Around you, everyone knows how it went; no one will say a word. You are given polite congratulations, and the matter moves on to the next file. You go home dispossessed, certain that protesting would harm you more than anything else. What do you do?
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Justification
The root of all unhappiness, Epictetus argues, is to expect one's happiness from things that are not in our power. Hence the opening move of the : sorting our concerns into two classes by the single criterion of mastery, what is wholly up to us (judgments, desires, aversions) and what is not (body, goods, reputation). The is not one thesis among others but the operation that conditions everything that follows: all disturbance arises from having claimed a hold on what eludes us. Where the older Stoics dwelt on cosmic fate, Epictetus brings the division down to the concrete use, here and now, of what is properly mine.
Of things, some are in our power, and others are not.Enchiridion, §1
Enchiridion, §1 · Discourses, I.1
Justification
Taking up the of , Marcus continually brings his mind back to the one masterable domain: external things do not touch the soul, which is disturbed only by the judgment it adds to them; remove that judgment, drop the « I am harmed », and the harm itself is gone.
Meditations, V, 19 · Meditations, VI, 52 · Meditations, VIII, 47
Anchors: Epictetus · Marcus Aurelius · Marx