We spend enormous amounts of mental energy trying to control things that were never ours to control — the traffic, whether someone liked us, how a message landed. The Stoics had a name for this, and a way out of it.
Here is a thing I noticed about myself a few years ago:
I was standing in a grocery store checkout line that was moving very slowly, and I was furious. Not mildly impatient — genuinely, viscerally angry. My jaw was tight. My shoulders were up near my ears. I was rehearsing, in real time, all the reasons the situation was unacceptable: the cashier was too slow, the customer ahead of me had too many items, why were there only two registers open on a Saturday afternoon.
At some point, I caught myself and asked a question that felt strange at the time: what, exactly, am I trying to do right now?
I was trying to make the line move faster. Not in any practical sense — I wasn't going to say anything, wasn't going to do anything. I was just internally insisting, with enormous emotional energy, that the situation be different from what it was. And the situation, needless to say, was entirely indifferent to my insisting.
This is not a profound observation. People have been making it for thousands of years. The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome built an entire framework around what they called the dichotomy of control — the distinction between what is up to us and what is not. Epictetus, who had been a slave before becoming one of the most influential philosophers in the ancient world, put it about as plainly as it can be put: "Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions."
The line in the grocery store was not in my control. My response to standing in it was.
The weather inside the weather
We spend an enormous amount of mental energy on things we cannot change. Not just in dramatic, existential ways — though that too — but in the small, hourly texture of daily life.
The traffic is what it is. Whether or not it rains on the day we planned to be outside is already decided by atmospheric conditions that exist entirely outside our jurisdiction. Whether someone we admire likes us, whether a colleague interpreted an email the way we meant it, whether the economy does what we need it to do — none of these things respond to our worry, our rehearsing, our elaborate internal arguments about how they should go.
And yet. We spend extraordinary amounts of time and energy engaged in exactly this kind of effortful, fruitless resistance.
There is a particular flavour of anxiety that arrives in the gap between sending a message and receiving a reply. You sent it three days ago. You have read it back twelve times. You are now constructing elaborate interpretations of the silence: they're angry, they misunderstood, you said the wrong thing, the phrasing of the third sentence landed badly. None of this analysis changes anything. The reply will come or it won't; it will say what it says. The only thing your analysis is doing is making the waiting harder.
This is what the Stoics called suffering beyond necessity. Not suffering that arises from what actually happens to us, but suffering we generate ourselves by insisting, mentally, that things be different from what they are.
What is actually yours
The list of things that are genuinely within our control is shorter than most of us would like. It is also, once you really sit with it, not small.
You control your attention — what you choose to think about, what you deliberately place your focus on. You control your interpretation of events — not automatically, not without effort, but with practice. You control how you respond to difficulty: whether you become bitter or curious, whether you contract or expand. You control the values you act from, the standards you hold yourself to, the kind of person you are choosing to become through your choices.
You also, crucially, control whether you try to change things that can be changed. The Stoic framework is not passive fatalism. Modern Stoicism makes this clear: Epictetus was not saying accept everything, do nothing, all outcomes are equivalent. He was saying: distinguish between the effort of action and the suffering of resistance. You can work to get the line moving faster, if that is possible. What you cannot do is make the line move faster by being miserable about it in your head.
The distinction is between what we can influence through our actions and what we are trying to influence through pure insistence. The first is agency. The second is a kind of magical thinking — the belief that if we worry enough, resist enough, rehearse our frustration enough, the world will eventually capitulate. It won't. The weather does not negotiate.
What letting go actually feels like
I want to be careful here, because "let go" is one of those phrases that has been used so often it has lost most of its meaning. It has come to sound like a demand to feel differently — just decide to feel fine, which is not how feelings work, and is also not what the Stoics meant.
What letting go actually involves, in practice, is something more precise: redirecting the energy that was going into resistance and putting it somewhere it can actually do something.
When I caught myself in that grocery line, what helped was not telling myself to relax. What helped was asking: what would I prefer to be thinking about right now? And then choosing that instead. Not suppressing the frustration — it was there, it could stay — but declining to feed it with more attention, more rehearsal, more elaborate grievance.
Over time, with practice, the pause between the stimulus and the insistence gets longer. You start to notice the moment when you're about to devote fifteen minutes to worrying about something you cannot change. You don't always redirect. But you notice. And noticing is where the work actually lives.
This idea has a clinical parallel that goes beyond ancient philosophy. The psychologist Albert Ellis, who developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in the 1950s, built his entire clinical framework around the distinction between events and our interpretation of them. His central insight — that suffering is not caused by what happens to us, but by what we tell ourselves about what happens — makes explicit what the Stoics understood intuitively. Our interpretations are where we have leverage.
These frameworks are useful for everyday friction and habitual worry; they are not a substitute for professional support when anxiety or distress runs deeper.
The things we cannot reach
Whether people like you is not your place to control. You can be kind, genuine, thoughtful, and generous — all of which influence the probability of being liked — but the final judgment lives in someone else's mind, which is, by definition, not your jurisdiction.
Whether the economy recovers, whether the housing market does what you need it to, whether the election goes the way you think it should, whether your children make the choices you hope for — these are all, in the Stoic sense, externals. You can act well in relation to them. You cannot determine them.
The more time you spend trying to control them through internal resistance — through worry, resentment, rehearsed arguments, anxious projection — the more of your life you spend in a kind of psychic labour that produces nothing. And the more of your actual energy, attention, and creativity gets consumed by that labour, leaving less for the things you actually can influence.
This is not a resignation. It is, in a very literal sense, a reallocation of resources. The American Psychological Association recommends, as part of stress management, focusing your energy on things within your control rather than on those that aren't.
Starting small
The grocery line is a good place to start. So is the traffic. So is the weather.
These are situations so clearly outside our control that even identifying them as such is almost embarrassing — of course I cannot make the traffic move faster by being agitated about it. And yet most of us spend significant portions of our commutes in precisely that agitation, as if the cars ahead of us might sense our impatience and clear the road.
Starting with the small and obvious cases builds a muscle. You practise the redirect — the noticing, the pause, the reallocation of attention — in low-stakes situations until it becomes more available in higher-stakes ones. The message you sent three days ago that hasn't been replied to is a harder case than the weather. But it's the same case.
The rain is going to do what it does. The reply will say what it says. The line will move at the speed it moves. What is yours — genuinely, inalienably yours — is what you do with the hours in between.
