We cry to god almighty, ‘how can we escape this agony?’ Fool, don’t you have hands?
Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings
We often feel powerless to the turns of fate in our lives, from things as innocuous as traffic jams to persistent frustrations in our day jobs. The good news, though, can be found in the above entreaty from the slave-turned-Stoic teacher Epictetus, which encapsulates the truth of self-reliance.
In each person, there is a reserve of virtue, dignity, and power that cannot be taken away, allowing us to meet obstacles as they come and have strength to change our circumstances. The most effective way to begin to rely on yourself is by separating out the controllable from the uncontrollable, the things we have power over and the things we don’t, the internal and the external.
To the Stoics, this separation was simple on paper— the internal consists of products of the mind, things like our attitude, virtue, and reason.
How appropriate that the gods put under our control only the most powerful ability that governs all the rest – the ability to make the right use of external appearances [our perceptions] – and that they didn’t put anything else under our control.
Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings
Everything else, then, is external, and therefore not under our control. Whether acts of fate, the actions of others, or the inevitability of decay over time, these are things that cannot— and should not— be controlled.
What we can do, however, is control how we respond to these things. Building a foundation upon this principle allows us to take real action in our lives. While we cannot necessarily control all of the results that will follow, paying attention to our reactions and intentions leads to greater resilience and happiness.
This framing informs a psychological concept that was developed by Julian B. Rotter in the 1950s: locus of control. Locus of control is the “construct that is used to categorize people’s basic motivational orientations and perceptions of how much control they have over the conditions of their lives” (APA Psychological Dictionary). Essentially, locus of control is a label for how people view the things that happen in their lives; are they in control, or are outside forces in control?
There are two broad categories of people in this conceptualization: those with an external locus of control, and those with an internal locus of control. People with an external locus tend to believe that the occurrences in their lives happen largely outside of their control, enacted by uncontrollable forces (fate, god, chance, etc). People with an internal locus tend to believe that their own agency leads to life occurrences, with their internal states driving their behavior.
As with most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The most important factor, though, is how we perceive the control. In most situations, it is more productive to take on an internalized locus of control, working to trace the line from an unfortunate circumstance to a reasonable cause. This goes from smaller misfortunes, like getting caught in traffic, to circumstances fully outside of your control, like not being selected for a promotion.
These are, as much as it seems otherwise, reasonable events. When you consider what goes in to the selection process for a promotion, or the multilayered events that cause traffic, it starts to become clear that these things are externals, outside of your control. The internals that apply are perseverance, patience, and resilience, among others.
Having a bad turn of fate does not mean that things always turn out poorly and that you are powerless; rather, it gives you an opportunity to rise to the occasion, or find mindfulness in extra time on the road, or demonstrate that you can bounce back when things don’t go your way.
This is the key to self-reliance: “to accept it without arrogance; to let it go with indifference” (Meditations, Marcus Aurelius). Regardless of the circumstances, if we can find what is truly our own and act on it, we can begin to build under any conditions.
Edited by Jeremy Harr and Abigail McKay Cherry