The dichotomy of control: Epictetus’s first lesson

Sort one situation now

Pick one thing that is bothering you today: a meeting, a message you are waiting on, a family plan that keeps changing. The exercise below is the Try It Now from the app’s Practice Library, step for step. You name the situation, sort its parts into up to me and not up to me, add parts of your own, and choose one action for the part that is yours. It takes about two minutes, every step is optional, and nothing you type is sent or stored.

When you finish, the tool lays out your sort in two columns. Copy my notes puts it on your clipboard, and Print gives you a paper copy of the page with your sort on it.

A blank worksheet

To do it on paper from the start, take a blank sheet and draw a line down the middle. Write the situation across the top, Up to me over the left column and Not up to me over the right. List every part of the situation you can think of, putting each on one side or the other. Then circle one thing on the left that you will do today. That is the whole worksheet. You don’t need to download anything or give an email address.

If something specific is upsetting you right now, the longer exercise for things you can’t control adds a passage from Epictetus and a step for letting the rest go. For a worry about something still ahead, the Worry exercise first separates what you know from what you imagine. Both use the same sort.

What it means

Epictetus divides everything that can matter to you into two groups. The first group is your own mental acts: what you judge to be true, good or bad, what you set out to do, what you want and what you try to avoid. The second group is everything else: your body, your possessions, your reputation, your position, and every choice other people make. The first group, he says, is “by nature free” (Enchiridion 1). The second can always be blocked or taken away.

The practice is to notice which group something belongs to before you pour effort or worry into it. Your effort goes to the first group. The second group still gets your attention and your best action, but you don’t stake your peace of mind on how it turns out. A job offer, a friend’s reply, the weather on the day of an outdoor wedding: you can prepare, ask, plan and adapt, but the result was never yours to hold.

The two lists are Epictetus’s. The name is not. He speaks of things that are, and are not, “in our power,” which is George Long’s English for the Greek eph’ hēmin, a phrase modern scholars often render as up to us. “Dichotomy of control” is a modern label that became common in recent books on Stoicism; William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life uses it as a chapter title, for example. We use the modern name because it is the one most people know, and we say so.

What Epictetus actually wrote

Epictetus was born in the 50s CE in Hierapolis in Asia Minor, spent part of his life enslaved in Rome, and later taught at Nicopolis in northwest Greece until his death around 135. His student Arrian recorded his teaching in the Discourses. The short Enchiridion, or Handbook, is a digest of it (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). The Handbook opens with the division itself:

In plain English:

• Opinion is your judgment about what something is and whether it is good or bad.
• Movement towards a thing is your impulse to act: deciding to do something.
• Desire and aversion are what you want and what you try to avoid.
• The body, property, reputation, offices means your health and looks, what you own, what others think of you, and your job or title. You can influence every one of them. None of them is fully yours.

The ellipses mark where we leave out the Greek terms Long adds in brackets. In the sentences that follow, Epictetus spells out the cost of mixing the two groups up. In our own words: if you take what belongs to others for your own, you will be frustrated, you will complain, and you will blame gods and people; if you count only what is yours as yours, no one can force or block you (Enchiridion 1).

He makes the same point at the start of the Discourses, more sharply. Having argued that reason is the one faculty that can examine itself, he asks what a person should keep ready when things go badly:

“Will” here is Long’s word for prohairesis, the capacity to judge and choose. This is not bravado. A tyrant can chain your leg; he cannot make your judgment for you. Epictetus adds that these are the thoughts students of philosophy should rehearse and write out every day, then tells the story of Agrippinus, a Roman whose trial was under way in the Senate. Told he had been sentenced to exile, Agrippinus asked whether his property had been taken. It had not, so he proposed they go to Aricia and have dinner (Discourses 1.1).

The Handbook’s first chapter ends with the exercise itself, the ancestor of the sort at the top of this page:

An “appearance” (phantasia) is a first impression: the jolt you feel when the email arrives or the car cuts in. Epictetus asks you to name it as an impression, not yet the truth, and then to ask one question before any other: is this in my power or not?

Twelve everyday examples

Most real situations are mixed. The skill is to split them finely enough that the left column holds something you can do today.

Two things stand out. The left column is never empty: even when the outcome is completely out of your hands, your judgment about it and your next step are still yours. And the right column is full of things you care about, which leads to the most common misreading.

What it doesn’t mean

The dichotomy of control is often heard as permission to stop caring about anything you can’t control, or as a way to shrug off responsibility. Epictetus taught neither. He raises the objection himself in the Discourses:

In Stoic language, things outside your power are “indifferent”: not good or bad in themselves. What you do with them is not indifferent at all. So you choose the captain, the crew and the day with care, and when the storm comes, your part is done. That is not passivity. It is a precise account of where your responsibility starts and where it stops.

Marcus Aurelius draws the same line around the body. It is not fully his, but he still owes it care:

Body and breath are his “so far as it is thy duty to take care of them” (Meditations 12.3). Only the mind is properly his, and he says what a free mind does: “doing what is just and accepting what happens and saying the truth” (Meditations 12.3).

Three misreadings to set aside:

• It is not indifference to other people. Other people’s choices are not up to you, but how you act toward them is. Justice, one of the four Stoic virtues, lives in the left column.
• It is not giving up on outcomes. You still apply for the job, fix the leak and argue the case as well as you can. You just don’t make your peace depend on the verdict.
• It is not pretending nothing hurts. The practice is about where your effort and your sense of what is good should go. It is not a rule against feeling anything. For more on this, see Stoicism and emotions and the modern caricature known as toxic Stoicism.

Dichotomy, trichotomy or circle of control?

You will meet two modern variations of the idea. Both are useful. Neither is ancient.

The trichotomy of control. In A Guide to the Good Life, the philosopher William B. Irvine argued that two categories are too few. He proposed three: things you control completely, things you don’t control at all, and things you control partly. For the middle group, his advice is to internalize your goals. In a tennis match, make your goal to play as well as you can rather than to win, because the first is up to you and the second is not.

A common reply from other modern readers of Epictetus is that the middle category dissolves when you look closely. Winning the match is not partly yours. It is a single outcome that your effort contributes to. Your effort is wholly up to you, and the result wholly is not. Irvine’s internalized goal is the dichotomy applied: you split a mixed situation into its two parts. The difference lies mostly in how the idea is taught.

The circle of control. This is a modern diagram, not a Stoic one. It often shows three rings: what I control at the center, what I can influence around it, and what I can’t control on the outside. The circle of influence and circle of concern come from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). The three-ring worksheets common in classrooms and workplaces are later variations on his two circles.

Here is how the modern models map onto Epictetus’s two groups:

The biggest difference is where the line falls. Circle worksheets often put “my actions” and “my words” in the inner ring. Epictetus counts your actions as yours only as choices, and he puts the body among the things not in our power: you can decide to go for a run, but not that your knee will hold. The stricter line is the point. It leaves you something to do that no one can block, which is what he means when he calls it free.

Where it leads

The Handbook puts this lesson first, and much of Epictetus’s teaching grows out of it. The first consequence comes in the very next chapter. Desire and aversion were on the list of things in our power, so Epictetus tells his students where to aim them:

In other words, stop trying to avoid disease, death and poverty, which are not in your power, and aim your aversion at what goes against nature within your power, which in practice means your own faults, such as judging rashly or acting unfairly. The instruction to give up desire holds only “for the present” (Enchiridion 2). Epictetus gives two reasons: desiring what is not in your power leaves you unfortunate, and the good things in your power that would be worth desiring are not yet within a learner’s reach. It is a pause while you learn what is worth wanting, not a life without wanting.

Two more threads run from the same list. Opinion came first on it, and Enchiridion 5 makes the point that what disturbs people is their judgment about events, not the events themselves; our close reading of Enchiridion 5 takes it line by line. And Epictetus, who had been enslaved, builds his account of freedom on the division: someone who wants only what is in his own power cannot be blocked.

To keep going, read the principles the practice rests on, or try the Evening Examination, which asks each night what outside your control disturbed you. If you have seen a popular line about having power over your mind credited to Marcus Aurelius, here is where it comes from. The whole Practice Library is listed by theme, and our guide to the Enchiridion walks through the rest of the Handbook.