"When you can, self-modification is harmful. It lets you accept things you could change if you worked to to change them." I think "changing the things you can"

"When you can, self-modification is harmful. It lets you accept things you could change if you worked to to change them." I think "changing the things you can" (as Niebuhr once put it) is precisely the second half of the stoic idea. In fact, not changing things that by rights should be changed runs contrary to virtue, which the stoics held as the chief -- and indeed, the only -- true good.