Epictetus and the Freedom to Choose Your Attitude

Timeless lessons for the social media age

"Discourses - Epictetus (illustration 1).jpg" by impulsenine is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Epictetus was one of the most famous philosophers of the ancient world. His hard-won wisdom has stood the test of time and deserves to be much better known in our hyper-connected world. As we have seen, social media platforms can easily generate groupthink, cognitive dissonance and sterile debates. At their worst, these platforms make it much too easy for outraged people to form online mobs. Epictetus would be dismayed that we have progressed so little.

Far from the stereotype of ancient philosophers being highly privileged conformists, Epictetus was a disabled slave. His name means “acquired” in Greek. He was born a slave in Phrygia (in modern-day Turkey) around 50 CE. One ancient author said that he was disabled since childhood. Another said that his owner broke his leg deliberately and it never healed properly. We will never know which version is true. The ancient world’s attitude to disability seems very foreign nowadays - newborn babies who were perceived as imperfect were expected to be exposed on a hillside, while there were also special markets for disabled slaves for rich people who took a morbid interest in these matters.

Being a slave in the ancient world was almost unthinkably awful. Slaves in Rome were considered property without individual rights. Your owner had the right to mutilate you, rape you, torture you or kill you as he saw fit, although there was also a path to freedom and citizenship. In Epictetus’s time, emperors had begun to grant slaves some modest rights, like the right to complain against a master in court. Murdering slaves would be criminalized after Epictetus’s death.

Epictetus spent his youth in Rome, where he belonged to a secretary to the Emperor. He discovered Stoic philosophy as a youth and was allowed to study under Musonius Rufus. The school of Stoicism had been founded in the 3rd Century BCE by Zeno of Citium. It took its name from the Stoa Poikile, a painted porch in Athens where Zeno and his followers gathered to discuss the importance of developing virtues in order to live a good life. Although Stoicism appears to have developed independently from Buddhism, there are striking similarities between the two approaches. It is worth mentioning that Alexander the Great campaigned in India when Zeno was a child.

After being freed in 68 CE around the age of 18, Epictetus became a philosophy teacher in Rome. In 93 CE, when he was in his early forties, all philosophers were banned from the city. He moved to Greece and founded his own school of Stoic philosophy. His student Arrian compiled lecture notes as The Discourses and later wrote a digest called The Enchiridion, or handbook. Epictetus lived a life of great simplicity, with few possessions, to his mid-80s. He adopted a friend’s child when he was an old man, but the details are a little murky.

[The next two paragraphs include quotes from ancient texts. Please feel free to skip them if you want a more modern explanation.]

The experience of slavery marked Epictetus’s thinking. One of his key insights was the contrast between what we can change and we can’t. In The Enchiridion, Arrian expressed his views like this: “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. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

Arrian and Epictetus expressed the same idea slightly differently in Book Four of The Discourses. “There is only one way to happiness, and let this rule be ready both in the morning and during the day and by night; the rule is not to look toward things which are out of the power of our will, to think that nothing is our own, to give up all things to the Divinity, to Fortune; to make them the superintendents of these things, whom Zeus also has made so; for a man to observe that only which is his own, that which cannot be hindered; and when we read, to refer our reading to this only, and our writing and our listening.” This quote is often simplified in internet memes to this: “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things that are beyond the power of our will.”

If your eyes glazed over at the dense prose, don’t worry! The central idea is very simple. As a slave, Epictetus realized that there was one freedom that could never be taken away from him: The freedom to choose what attitude to take to events that are beyond our control.

We normally think that our emotional reactions follow naturally from events. Someone does something that we perceive as irritating and we then get irritated. Epictetus’ great insight was that B doesn’t necessarily follow A. Someone does something. We can’t control the act at all. However, we decide whether to get irritated or not. Instead of getting irritating, we could try and find the funny side; or we could zoom out and think about the bigger picture so the action appears increasingly irrelevant; or we could breath deeply and forgive the other person for his or her failings.

Epictetus’ insight into the last freedom has resonated through the ages with thoughtful people. One modern example is Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, who was sent to various concentration camps by the Nazis, including Auschwitz. His parents, his brother and his first wife died in the camps, but he survived. He wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days after the War. It sold millions of copies and remains essential reading.

Frankl wrote: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Let’s return to the age of social media. Imagine someone says something on your favourite platform that you find irritating or annoying. Maybe you feel that the views somehow threaten your identity. Epictetus and Frankl would want you to pause. Suspend judgement for a moment. You can’t control what other people think or feel or how they express themselves. You can, however, control how you react. If you choose to feel threatened, you are giving the other person power over your identity. Why not define your identity yourself?

This is a powerful and deep lesson. I think it deserves to be much more widely discussed in the 21st century. If you are free to choose your attitude, then getting offended becomes your problem rather than the problem of the person with allegedly offensive views. The implication is obvious: We should all work on taking ownership of our emotions. See you next week!

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.