October 11, 2026

Train Your Wishes

If you wish your children and your wife and your friends to live for ever, you are silly; for you wish the things to be in your power which are not in your power, and the things to be your own which are not your own.

Epictetus was born a slave in Hierapolis and later taught Stoic philosophy to Roman students after gaining his freedom, eventually founding a school in Nicopolis where his lectures were recorded by his student Arrian. The Enchiridion, a short handbook drawn from those lectures, opens with the dichotomy of control and returns to it often, as in this passage warning against wishing that loved ones live forever or that others behave exactly as we want. Epictetus is pointing out that such wishes quietly hand our peace of mind to things we cannot govern, since the lifespan and choices of other people are never truly ours to command. The Stoic tradition treats this split, between what depends on us and what does not, as the foundation of all practical ethics. Practicing it daily means catching the moment a wish or worry drifts onto someone else's choices and steering it back toward our own judgments and efforts.

A principle of Stoicism: The Dichotomy of Control →