Almost Nothing Is Your Problem

Here is a thing that sounds like it should be depressing but turns out not to be, or at least not entirely: you control almost nothing. 1

Your body, which you probably think of as pretty much yours in the most basic proprietary sense, is not actually under your control. It will get sick when it gets sick, will age according to schedules you did not approve, will, if you are like most people, eventually stop working altogether and in ways that tend not to be especially dignified. Your reputation, which you spend truly heroic amounts of energy managing and manicuring, turns out to be just the aggregated opinions of other people, which is to say it’s located entirely inside other people’s heads, which is to say it’s about as under your control as the weather in Taipei. Your job. Your relationships. Whether the subway comes. Whether the person you love loves you back. None of it.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who had pretty good reasons to think about the nature of control given that he spent the first part of his life as a literal slave, put it like this: “Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing.”

And that’s it. That’s the list. Everything else—your property, your body, 2 your reputation, office, and whatever else is not of your own doing—is, in the Stoics’ somewhat blunt formulation, Not Your Problem. Or rather: it is your problem in the sense that it affects you, obviously, but it is not your problem in the sense that worrying about it, strategizing about it, or losing sleep over it will have exactly zero effect on the outcome, and so the energy spent is not just wasted but actively corrosive to the only thing you do control, which is your own interior state, the texture and quality of your own thoughts.

This is, on first encounter, either blindingly obvious or completely insane, depending on what kind of person you are and what sort of illusions you’re currently maintaining.

The thing is, though, most people who encounter Stoicism on a podcast or in a LinkedIn post tend to miss this next part entirely. The dichotomy of control is not actually a recipe for resignation or passivity or that kind of grim-jawed “whatever, man” detachment that bros 3 sometimes mistake for philosophical maturity. It is almost the opposite. Because once you actually internalize that you cannot control other people’s behavior, once you move past intellectual assent to something you viscerally feel, something strange and almost paradoxical happens, which is that you become capable of treating them with genuine kindness.

Let me try to explain why this is, because it seems counterintuitive and is also, I think, the entire point.

When you believe, at some level, that you can control how other people feel about you, that the right combination of niceness and strategic self-presentation can make them like you, respect you, not leave you, you are not actually relating to them as independent beings with their own interior lives and sovereign wills. You are relating to them as problems to be solved, as variables in an equation whose output is your own emotional security. And the relationship this produces, whatever else it is, is not kindness. It might be niceness, in the sense of being pleasing and agreeable, but niceness turns out to be a fundamentally different thing than kindness, and the difference matters. Niceness is, at root, a bid for control. A way of manipulating outcomes. The Stoics were remarkably clear on this: “Sometimes people will be nice in an attempt to please or manipulate others. They are trying to control or influence how the other person thinks or feels about them.”

Kindness, on the other hand, becomes possible only when you’ve given up the project of controlling the other person’s response. You are kind because kindness is an expression of who you are, of your own values and commitments, and not because you expect it to produce a particular result. The result is not in your control. The kindness is.

You are kind because kindness is an expression of who you are, of your own values and commitments, and not because you expect it to produce a particular result.

Marcus Aurelius, who was emperor of Rome and therefore had more opportunity than most people to try controlling things that couldn’t be controlled, used to begin his mornings with a little meditation that went something like: “Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness. All of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”

Which sounds, at first, like the diary of someone having a very bad time at work. But the point of the exercise was not to wallow in anticipated misery; it was to remind himself that other people’s behavior was, in a fundamental sense, their business and not his. They were going to do what they were going to do. What else could they do, given who they were and what they understood about the world? His job was not to fix them or control them but to respond in a way that was consistent with his own values. To meet insolence with patience. Selfishness with generosity. Not because these responses would necessarily change the other person—that was not in his control—but because patience and generosity were expressions of who he wanted to be.

There is something almost unbearably liberating about this, once you really get it. The exhausting labor of managing other people’s perceptions of you, of strategizing and posturing and performing, starts to seem not just futile but beside the point. You are freed up to just be kind. To act in ways that you can actually justify to yourself regardless of how they land.

Here’s the other thing, though, the thing that maybe makes this whole framework not just philosophically interesting but actually urgent in a way that matters for how you live: the same logic that frees you to be kind to others applies to yourself. Your job is to do the best you can with what’s actually under your control. Your thoughts. Your choices. Your efforts. The outcome—whether the project succeeds, whether the person forgives you, whether the world cooperates—that’s not yours to determine. What you can do is show up, with as much honesty and care as you can muster, and then let go of the rest.

Which doesn’t mean not caring. It means caring about the right things in the right way. It means attaching your sense of self-worth not to outcomes you can’t control but to efforts you can. It means, in practice, that you can fail without being destroyed by the failure. And you will fail, at some point. But the failure was never entirely in your hands to begin with.

There is, I think, a kind of spiritual hygiene in all of this, though “spiritual” is one of those words that makes certain people nervous and probably should. 5 What the Stoics were really talking about is a way of directing attention: focusing on what you can actually affect and releasing, with something like gratitude, everything else. And this turns out to be remarkably compatible with kindness, because kindness itself is something you can always do. It doesn’t depend on circumstances. It doesn’t require the other person’s cooperation. It’s one of the few things that is genuinely, completely, unconditionally within your power.

Kindness is in your control. And so is showing up, and trying, and paying attention to the person in front of you as if they were a real human being with their own infinite interior complexity and not just an instrument for meeting your needs.

That’s pretty much it, actually. That’s the whole thing.