Focus on the things you can control

Stoicism can help us find calmness in a world filled with pain, anxiety, and insatiable desires. To Stoics, we live in a reality that does not care about our personal opinions, we cannot ask it to remove the suffering and pain. But this does not mean we are helpless, there are two domains of life: the external, the things that happen in our lives which we cannot control, and the internal, how our mind reacts and interprets the external reality, which we can control.

Focusing on the things we cannot control will make us endlessly unsatisfied. We must then focus solely on what we can control. Our sense of joy comes from the pursuit of the meaningful things in our lives, not superficial things.

A truly satisfied person is someone who can live without the things that he desires or feels comfort with. No wealth, material abundancy, fame or power has any value if the person who possesses them has not yet learned to live properly without them, it is after all, temporary.

As Marcus Aurelius puts it “Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life for he who has understood existence”

Temporarily refraining ourselves from the things that we depend on can prove how truly strong you are without the things that you think you need. Only then can we know that we have been using them not because we needed them, but because we had them.

We should strive in an acceptance (amor fati) towards everything that happens and instead, focus our attention on controlling our reactions to the things that we can control, acting virtuously regardless of misfortunes life might bring us.