On a Peaceful Life

February 3, 2025

“But I was hoping to lead a peaceful life.”

You’ve often heard—you need to suspend desire completely and train aversion only on things within your power. You should dissociate yourself from everything outside yourself— the body, possessions, reputation, books, applause, as well as office or lack of office. Because a preference for any of them immediately makes you a slave, a subordinate, and prone to disappointment.

Keep Cleanthes’ verse handy:
Lead me, Zeus, lead me, Destiny.

Do I have to go to Rome? Then I go to Rome. To Gyara? All right, I go to Gyara instead. To Athens? Then Athens it is. To jail? Well, then I go to jail.

But if you ever think, “When do we get to Athens?” you are already lost. Either you’re going to be depressed when your wish is not realized or foolishly pleased with yourself if it is, overjoyed for the wrong reasons. And next time, if you’re not so lucky, you’ll grow disconsolate when events are not so much to your liking. Give them all up.

“But Athens is lovely.”

It would be lovelier still if you could secure happiness—free of emotion, poised, and dependent on no one except yourself.

“But Rome is all crowds and sycophancy.”

But the reward for enduring inconveniences is peace. So if this is the time for them, why not conquer your aversion? Why endure them like a donkey hit by a stick? […]

There is one road to peace and happiness: renunciation of externals; regard nothing as your own; hand over everything to fortune and the deity.

~ Epictetus, Book IV