Financial freedom is not real freedom: lessons from Epictetus

Executive overview

Most people assume wealth and power bring freedom, and poverty or oppression take it away. Epictetus — a Greek slave in the Roman Empire who was tortured, exiled, and yet became one of Rome's most influential philosophers — proves otherwise.

True freedom is internal. It starts with knowing what you control and ruthlessly directing your energy there. The enslaved philosopher who became free teaches what the rich and powerful rarely learn.

The tear-away calendar and time

• Each torn page is a day gone — a small daily death the Stoics called it
• Philip Larkin's poem The Trees: their annual renewal is written in rings of grain; last year is dead
• The grief of passing time is also an invitation to begin afresh
• Missing days and tearing off a stack at once makes the loss visceral: where did that time go?

The dichotomy of control

• Epictetus' first task: separate what is up to us from what is not
• Up to us: judgment, motivation, desires, aversions — our inner doing
• Not up to us: other people's actions, circumstances, the past, outcomes
• Direct your energy points toward what is in your control; spending them elsewhere is waste
• A podium and a prison are both just places — freedom of choice exists within any situation
• The Serenity Prayer captures it: wisdom to know the difference, courage to seize the control that is yours

Escaping the opinion trap

• Having strong opinions about everything is a form of self-imposed imprisonment
• The world is full of events; forming judgments on all of them guarantees misery
• It is not things that upset us — it is our judgments about things
• You are free not to verbalize, not to pick at, not to explore every reaction you have
• Never be overheard complaining: letting an opinion go unspoken is letting it go entirely
• Strong opinions about things outside your control change nothing except your own suffering