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"What's external and what's internal?" > 1. Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, i

"What's external and what's internal?" > 1. Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions. http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html Does it matter where our desires and hope come from at the very beginning ? We have thousands of divergent influences pushing us everyday. The ones we choose to go with come from within, they come from you, probably ingrained and influenced by your environment, but the only thing that matters is that you take them as yours. Regarding "Is winning the point? What if someone doesn't care about winning? ", winning here has a wider meaning than the small 'winning a game' meaning, it means succeed at what you set yourself to. You're of course free not to set goals to your own life, but doing so has long been found to be one of the best way to find happiness and meaning (it's the conclusion for Candid of Voltaire for example, but there's much more). If you're interested in the matter, I can recommend "Man's search for meaning" from Viktor Frankl

chousuke 5y ago
Are people's desires and aversions really something they can control? The thought feels alien to me. It's very difficult for me to even tell what I really want, let alone intentionally channel effort towards achieving any such thing. The largest obstacles I face when it comes to achieving things is really that the things I want to do and the things I feel motivated to do are very rarely the same. Often I am extremely motivated to do things that I really don't want to be doing; I can spend hours fixated on something irrelevant and afterwards feel exhausted and annoyed because I really would rather have done something else, but my brain disagreed.

chousuke 5y ago

Are people's desires and aversions really something they can control? The thought feels alien to me. It's very difficult for me to even tell what I really want, let alone intentionally channel effort towards achieving any such thing. The largest obstacles I face when it comes to achieving things is really that the things I want to do and the things I feel motivated to do are very rarely the same. Often I am extremely motivated to do things that I really don't want to be doing; I can spend hours fixated on something irrelevant and afterwards feel exhausted and annoyed because I really would rather have done something else, but my brain disagreed.