How the Stoics handled failure and setbacks

What the Stoics counted as failure

Every failure has two parts. One is the result: the offer that went to another candidate, the shop that closed after three years, the exam you have to sit again, the email that begins “After careful consideration.” The other is your own part: how you prepared, how hard and how honestly you tried, how you behaved when it went wrong, and what you do now. The Handbook of Epictetus, compiled from his teaching by his student Arrian, opens by drawing that line: some things are up to us and some are not. Its modern name is the dichotomy of control.

The line changes what a failure can mean. For a Stoic, a result that falls short is something that happened, not something you are. It can still cost a great deal (income, a plan, a year of work), and the Stoics did not pretend otherwise. They counted money, health and a good reputation among the things it is natural to prefer and reasonable to pursue (preferred indifferents), but not among the things that decide whether a life is going well. The only failure that is wholly yours is a failure of conduct: carelessness, cowardice, dishonesty, unkindness. That kind gets its own section below, on mistakes and regret.

Rejection is the clearest case. Whether an employer, a publisher or a person says yes is their decision. What was yours was the attempt, and the attempt is finished. You can judge it on its own terms, whatever the answer was.

The Stoics wrote from experience here. Seneca was exiled to Corsica under Claudius. Epictetus spent his youth enslaved and was later banished from Rome when Domitian expelled the philosophers. Marcus Aurelius spent much of his reign on campaign, with a plague moving through the empire. If you would rather work through your own setback first, the closest free exercise is at the end of this page.

Plans made with a reservation

Seneca describes how the wise person makes plans in On Tranquility of Mind:

Seneca’s wise man still sails, stands for office and puts his money to work. What he never does is count the result as promised. So when the voyage is called off or the election lost, things have gone, in Seneca’s words, not “as he wished it would, but as he thought it would” (On Tranquility of Mind 13). He is disappointed, but not ambushed. The habit now goes by the modern name reserve clause, and the reserve clause traces it through Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus.

The promontory

Marcus Aurelius wrote this note to himself in the fourth book of the Meditations:

A promontory is easy to misread as a picture of toughness, a rock that feels nothing. The lines after it are about how you phrase what happened. Marcus writes out the complaint, “Unhappy am I because this has happened to me?”, and then corrects it: unhappy becomes happy, and because becomes though. The event stays in the sentence, but it no longer explains how he is doing. The new because points to his own steadiness instead.

Further on, Marcus asks himself whether what happened will stop him from being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent or free (Meditations 4.49). Ask that of a real setback. Say you lost your job in a round of cuts after six years. The layoff can take the paycheck, the routine and the plans you had for spring. It can’t make you unfair to the colleagues who stayed, dishonest in your next interview or careless with the savings you have. Those were never in its reach.

None of this asks you to call the layoff good. Marcus’s claim is narrower. In the same entry he counts something a misfortune only if it is a falling away from human nature, so the real misfortune would be letting the event change how you act. The good fortune still open to you in a bad month is meeting it well: “to bear it nobly is good fortune.”

What power you have for turning it to use

Epictetus attaches a question to every event, good or bad:

His examples are an attractive person, hard labor and abusive words, and each comes paired with a capacity you already have: continence, endurance, patience. Failure has its own pairings. A rejection you have to absorb before trying again calls for endurance. The colleague who says “I could have told you” calls for patience. Owning your share of what went wrong, without groveling and without excuses, calls for honesty. Sending the next application when you would rather hide is courage.

Epictetus ends with a promise: once the question is a habit, “the appearances will not carry you along with them.” The first rush of this is a disaster is one of those appearances. The way to have the question ready on the day of a large failure is to ask it about small ones first, like the missed train or the returned draft.

A shorter chapter of the Handbook gives the same test from the other side:

“Will” is Long’s word for what Epictetus calls prohairesis: your power to decide what to make of things and what to do about them. Run your setback through the chapter. A rejected manuscript is an impediment to publication this year, not to the next draft. A failed licensing exam holds up the license; it doesn’t hold up the studying. Each failure is “an impediment to something else, but not to yourself” (Enchiridion 9). Marcus makes a related point in Meditations 5.20, the source of the modern slogan “the obstacle is the way”.

Adversity as training

Seneca wrote On Providence to answer a question his friend Lucilius had raised: if the world is ordered by providence, why do good people suffer? The fourth chapter gives one of his answers.

The line to keep from a failure is the first one: “a man cannot know himself without a trial” (On Providence 4). Until something goes badly wrong, you can only guess how you take it. After the company folds or the campaign is lost, you know a few things you couldn’t have learned another way: what you do in the first week, who you turn to, what you still want badly enough to try again.

Seneca frames this in the language of his theology. In the same chapter, God tests the people he loves, the way a general sends his best soldiers on the hardest missions, and Seneca admires men who went looking for hardship to prove themselves. You don’t have to follow him that far. You can take the point about self-knowledge without the theology, without going looking for trouble, and without telling yourself afterward that the loss was secretly a blessing.

Marcus gives the plainer, drier version:

Marcus sets up two cases and closes both exits to complaint. Either this is something you are formed to bear, and complaining is beside the point, or it isn’t, and then “it will perish after it has consumed thee,” and complaining is beside the point again. His last sentence leaves you something to do. Whether a load is endurable “depends on thy own opinion,” he says, and he names the opinion that helps: that carrying it is “either thy interest or thy duty.” Months of applications after a layoff are the same months either way. Read as a running verdict on you, each rejection adds weight. Read as work you have a duty to do well, or as plainly in your interest, the same search becomes a task with a shape: so many letters a week, done properly, whatever the replies.

If what stays with you is dread of the next attempt, Stoicism and fear takes that up.

Mistakes and regret

Some failures are partly your doing: the deadline you let slide, the email you sent angry, the warning you didn’t act on. Here the Stoics are both stricter and gentler than you might expect.

The argument of this entry is about pleasure, but its first sentence is a definition worth keeping. Long’s word is repentance, the regret you feel for your own actions. It is “self-reproof for having neglected something useful” (Meditations 8.10). For a Stoic, the things that are useful in this sense are good actions: care, honesty, attention, nerve. So regret fits your conduct. It does not fit outcomes. I didn’t check the figures before I sent them is a regret with somewhere to go. The market turned and the other candidate had more experience are not regrets at all; they are facts about things that were never yours. Regret aimed at conduct points to something you can do differently, and once you have done it, the regret has finished its work.

Marcus has no patience for regret that never finishes:

His point in this entry is whose approval is worth wanting, but the man he describes is familiar: someone who “curses himself thrice every hour.” Marcus doesn’t see that as conscientiousness. To him it is the picture of a man whose praise isn’t worth having. Epictetus ranks the habit. In Enchiridion 5 he says, in our words, that the untrained person blames others for his troubles, the beginner blames himself, and the person whose training is complete blames neither. On that scale, blaming yourself is an improvement on blaming others, and still unfinished.

Marcus wrote this to himself about falling short:

The instruction is to come back: “when thou hast failed, return back again” (Meditations 5.9). He doesn’t ask for a clean record, only that he keep returning, and he wants philosophy to be like the bit of sponge and egg someone with sore eyes reaches for, not like a master waiting for his report. In practice: say plainly what you did, make whatever repair is still possible (the apology, the corrected report), note the change for next time, and get back to work.

A short review at night makes this a habit instead of a crisis. The Evening Examination is built on the nightly review Seneca describes in On Anger 3.36, and it asks what you did well before it asks what you would do better.

The closest free exercise

Setback is one of the twelve exercises in I Need Perspective, and in the app its guided version is part of Premium; this page doesn’t reproduce it. The closest free exercise is Outside My Control, which takes about two minutes. You name what went wrong, sort the pieces into what was up to you and what wasn’t, read a few lines from the first chapter of the Enchiridion, decide what you will stop trying to control, and choose one next action for the part that is yours. It suits a failure that has already happened and can’t be undone.