I tell you, you only have to learn to live like the healthy person does … living with complete confidence. What confidence? The only one worth holding, in what is trustworthy, unhindered, and can’t be taken away—your own reasoned choice.
—Epictetus, Discourses, 3.26.23b-24
As the Stoics say repeatedly, it’s dangerous to have faith in what you do not control. But your own reasoned choice? Well, for now that is in your control. Therefore, it is one of the few things you can have confidence in. It’s the one area of health that can’t suddenly be given a terminal diagnosis (except for the one we all get the day we’re born). It’s the only one that remains pristine and never wears down—it’s only the user who quits it; never will it quit the user.
In this passage, Epictetus points out that slaves and workers and philosophers alike can live this way. Socrates, Diogenes, and Cleanthes live this way—even while they had families and while they were struggling students.
And so can you.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman