"The Stoics gave us one of history's most practical psychological frameworks: divide the world into what you can control and what you cannot. Your judgments, choices, and responses belong to you. Everything else-weather, illness, other people's actions-falls outside your power. Direct your efforts inward, toward the only domain where effort has purchase. This is wisdom. It has saved countless people from fruitless anxiety about things beyond their reach. But it contains a hidden flaw-one that becomes painfully apparent"
"In the Greek philosophical tradition, the fundamental distinction was between tyche (chance, fortune, what happens to us) and psyche (soul, the seat of deliberation and choice). The Stoics codified this into their famous dichotomy of control. For them, the binary was absolute. Epictetus opens his Enchiridion: "Some things are within our power, while others are not." Within our power: our opinions, impulses, desires. Not within our power: our body, property, reputation-whatever is not our own doing."
The Stoics taught a strict dichotomy: divide what is within control (opinions, impulses, desires) from what is not (body, property, reputation, other people's actions). That framework treats events like lightning strikes and betrayals identically as uncontrollable fortune. Plato recognized that character can be read and predicts behavior, making some interpersonal actions attributable to another's psyche rather than mere chance. A more accurate division separates pure chance, one's own choices, and the deliberate dispositions of others. Directing effort inward remains valuable, but adapting responses requires recognizing when another's choices stem from character rather than random fate.
Read at Psychology Today
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