Epictetus, The Handbook 3: Remove the Will to Get

Remember that the will to get promises attainment of what you will, and the will to avoid promises escape from what you avoid; and he who fails to get what he wills is unfortunate, and he who does not escape what he wills to avoid is miserable.

 If then you try to avoid only what is unnatural in the region within your control, you will escape from all that you avoid; but if you try to avoid disease or death or poverty you will be miserable.

Therefore let your will to avoid have no concern with what is not in man’s power; direct it only to things in man’s power that are contrary to nature.

But for the moment you must utterly remove the will to get, for if you will to get something not in man’s power you are bound to be unfortunate; while none of the things in man’s power that you could honorably will to get is yet within your reach, impulse to act and not to act, these are your concern; yet exercise them gently and without strain, and provisionally.

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 2 (tr Matheson)

We are quite familiar with the idea that if we do not get what we want, we should try harder. Indeed, a dedicated will must always be firm and resolute. Yet we must also remember that what we want matters just as much as how much we want it. A dedicated will must also be informed with wisdom. Are we even certain we want the right things?

If we desire all the wrong things, no amount of willpower and effort will make us happy. This is even truer when we want things that we could never possibly make our own.

The most critical moment of my life was surely the time I realized I could not have something I desperately wanted, and I realized that there was absolutely nothing I could do to change that. It was the beginning of my Stoic journey. For all of the agony this has cost me over the years, it was also at the same time a blessing of Providence. Nature had called me out, and was trying to call me back.

I began to see that the greatest misery awaited me if I wanted things that were beyond my power. Like many of us, I often lied to myself, trying to assume that all the externals would indeed make me content: the right girl, the right job, the right friends, the right home. These can all indeed be wonderful things, but whether or not I was ever to get them was really not up to me.

The problem, I realized, was this whole conception of “getting” anything at all. Could I not learn that whatever conditions came my way, the person who I already was, and everything that Nature has given me in my own mind and heart, was more than enough for me to be happy? I am not a being that is fulfilled by possessing anything at all. I am a being that is fulfilled by living well.

I would sometimes tell myself this was a cop-out, just a way to find contentment by lowering the bar of expectation. I learned that it was quite the opposite, because it raised the bar to a much higher commitment, a commitment to freedom and responsibility for myself.

Written in 4/2001