“What is bad luck? Opinion. What are conflict, dispute, blame, accusation, irreverence, and frivolity? They are all opinions, and more than that, they are opinions that lie outside of our own reasoned choice, presented as if they were good or evil. Let a person shift their opinions only to what belongs in the field of their own choice, and I guarantee that person will have peace of mind, whatever is happening around them.”
EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.3.18b-19
Ryan Holiday was afraid to add that last word in today’s chapter title, haha. But I’m not! Opinions are like assholes — everybody’s got one. That’s the famous saying. And I’m going to extend it with another curse word (gasp): those opinions aren’t generally worth a damn.
Social media has convinced all of us that our opinion truly matters. That other people care what we think. That our random thought which just occurred to us is worth shouting from the virtual rooftops.
The only problem is that they’re not. They’re not particularly important or valuable, these snap decisions and viewpoints that we create. We have completely forgotten that we could easily be happily uninformed and clueless about a lot of things — and that that is a perfectly acceptable approach.
But instead, we let these opinions cause us angst and anxiety. We do it to ourselves! Rather than just realizing that events are generally neutral, we assign positive or negative opinions to them. We decide that occurrences are ‘good luck’ or ‘bad luck’, instead of accepting that they are neither of these things — that events just are. We create the harm, we ascribe it to the event.
Attributing good or evil values to things that are outside of our control — how impossible is that? That’s like a guarantee for stress. Instead, Epictetus says we should refocus our opinions to “what belongs in the field of [our] own choice”, e.g. what’s in our control. Then he says we will be guaranteed to have “peace of mind”.
Wow! Big words, but he was a wise man. I think he would have liked our modern famous saying, curse words and all 🙂
