Letting go of what you don't own: a Stoic practice

Executive overview

We treat people and things as possessions — and that makes loss more painful when it arrives. Epictetus's solution is active rehearsal: remind yourself regularly that everything is already breaking, already leaving. The practice turns grief from shock into something you've already begun to accept.

Reminding yourself of impermanence is not pessimism — it is how you stop taking people for granted.

Writing from the trenches, not from above

• Seneca acknowledged his own hypocrisy openly: "I am lying in the same ward, conversing with you about our common ailment."
• C.S. Lewis made the same case: the fellow pupil helps more than the master because he recently met the same difficulty.
• Stoic writing — Seneca's letters, Marcus's meditations, Epictetus's discourses — is peer-to-peer, not sage-to-student.

Train yourself to see breakage in advance

• Epictetus: treat loss like a breakable glass — when it falls, you won't be troubled.
• The Zen practice: repeat "the cup is already broken" so the moment it breaks holds no surprise.
• At Roman triumphs, an aide whispered to the victorious general: Memento mori — remember thou art mortal.
• Status, momentum, a bestseller run, an NFL career, a bull market — all end. They always do.
• Entropy is already working on everything you value, right now.

Applying this to people, not just possessions

• Scott Galloway: you are constantly losing your children as they age — the four-year-old is gone when they turn five.
• Epictetus: your precious one is not a possession, but a gift given for now, not forever.
• Taking people for granted, feeling entitled to them, is a profound mistake given their ephemerality.
• The antidote is the same whisper: they are mortal, and so are you.

The practice

• Do this regularly, consistently — not once in a crisis.
• Loss is real and painful; pretending otherwise only makes it more jarring when it arrives.
• No achievement makes you or anyone else less mortal.
• Live and act accordingly, before it is too late.