Epictetus’ “The Art of Living” 3: Events DON’T Hurt Us, But Our Views of Them CAN! Mindgasms
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Newest Mindgasms Quickie that is part 3 of my series on the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus’ book called The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness. The maxim that I am discussing in this video is “Events don’t hurt us, but our views of them can.” Epictetus wrote about how we cannot control the bad things that happen to us in life, including death, but we can control our responses to them. When the world takes a shit on our heads, that definitely sucks. However, it’s made even worse by stressing ourselves out about it, piling even more negative emotion on top of what we’ve already experienced. Like Epictetus said, “Don’t dread death or pain; dread the fear of death or pain.” Sometimes, awful life events occur, like 9/11, natural disasters, or the Holocaust. Viktor Frankl, who I mention in the video, was a Holocaust survivor who practised this Stoic principle, even though he was actually an Existentialist. In his book called Man’s Search For Meaning, he discusses how the way we see and respond to events is sometimes the only thing we can control. When he was a Nazi concentration camp prisoner, how he chose to feel about and react to profoundly inhuman acts was often the only part of his life over which he had any power at all.
Check out my second video on the Stoic philosopher named Epictetus’s book called “The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness.” This maxim is “Recognize Appearances for What They Really Are.” It’s all about remembering that things that are unpleasant to us are not what they appear to be, and that we should train ourselves to only care about these things that appear to be unpleasant if they are within our control. We should try very hard to avoid being annoyed by things that seem unpleasant to us if they are outside of our control. This relates to the first maxim that I made a video about, which is “Know What You Can Control and What You Can’t.”:
Check out my Mindgasms Podcast with Chief Keefe about different Stoic positions on physics (in the philosophical sense), theology and ethics:
Check out my playlist with every episode on Epictetus’ “The Art of Living,” so far:
