stoicism

Anxiety and Control

One of the things the stoics get right, is the insight that there is little an agent has any real power to influence. Even where it seems there is a great deal, that control is largely an illusion drawn from an overzealous interpretation of our experience of collective agreement. When I was young, I wasn’t particularly interested in who or what I could control, for its own sake. But I was interested in control over the world, insofar as it was an instrument to control over my own destiny.