Control Shrinks When We Crave the Uncontrollable
The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have. — Epictetus
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
What does this quote ask you to notice today?
Epictetus and the Stoic Starting Point
Epictetus frames freedom as an internal skill rather than an external condition. As a Stoic teacher, he insists that our well-being depends on correctly distinguishing what belongs to us—our judgments, aims, and choices—from what does not, such as reputation, outcomes, and other people’s behavior. From this starting point, his warning becomes practical: whenever we attach our happiness to what lies beyond our authority, we quietly hand over the steering wheel of our lives. The quote is not a call to apathy, but an invitation to place our highest value where our agency actually operates.
The “Dichotomy of Control” in Daily Life
Moving from principle to practice, Stoicism often summarizes its ethics with the dichotomy of control. Epictetus’ *Enchiridion* (c. 125 AD) opens by separating “things up to us” from “things not up to us,” and the quote you provided captures the emotional cost of confusing the two. Consider a common scenario: you may control whether you prepare thoroughly for an interview, but not whether the interviewer is biased, distracted, or constrained by budgets. If you value the offer itself above all else, you become vulnerable to every contingency; if you value your preparation and character, you retain composure regardless of the final decision.
Why External Valuations Reduce Inner Freedom
The deeper mechanism is that valuation creates dependence. When you treat an external outcome as necessary for peace—approval, status, perfect health, a predictable market—you start monitoring and managing forces that cannot be reliably managed, which naturally increases anxiety and reactivity. As a result, your attention shifts from deliberate choice to compulsive control-seeking: checking messages for reassurance, replaying conversations, obsessing over metrics, or trying to engineer other people’s opinions. In that way, the more you prize the external thing, the more it dictates your mood, and your sense of control contracts to whatever those externals allow.
Psychological Parallels: Locus of Control
Seen through a modern lens, Epictetus anticipates ideas like locus of control. Julian Rotter’s work on locus of control (1966) describes how people who believe outcomes are mainly shaped by external forces often feel less efficacious and more stressed, while those with a stronger internal locus tend to persist and regulate emotions more effectively. This does not mean pretending you can command the world; rather, it means investing your identity in what you can author: effort, values, and interpretation. Stoicism adds a moral dimension to this psychology by treating inner governance not merely as coping, but as the core of human dignity.
What Stoic “Control” Actually Means
Importantly, Stoic control is not dominance over events; it is sovereignty over response. Epictetus repeatedly returns to the idea that we cannot choose what happens, but we can choose what we make of it—our assent to impressions, our plans, and our next action. This reframes power as resilience. A storm can cancel a voyage, a colleague can misinterpret you, a policy can change overnight; none of these are trivial. Yet the Stoic claim is that your capacity for clear judgment and honorable action remains available, and that is the only “control” guaranteed to you.
Redirecting Value Without Withdrawing from Life
The practical next step is not to stop caring, but to relocate what you prize most. You can still prefer success, health, and respect, but treat them as “preferred indifferents”—valuable yet not required for integrity, a stance Marcus Aurelius echoes in *Meditations* (c. 170 AD) when he urges attention to what is “in your own ruling faculty.” In everyday terms, aim to measure your day by controllables: whether you acted honestly, prepared diligently, spoke kindly, and learned from setbacks. Then, when uncontrollable outcomes arrive—as they inevitably do—you lose a result, not your self-command. That is the freedom Epictetus is pointing toward.