Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Three beliefs that ought to cancel each other out, and don't. People are not born broken. Almost nothing that happens to you is yours to control.
And you are still, completely, responsible for what you make of it. Try holding all three at once for the next ten minutes and see what it does to the next setback you have.
You are standing in a queue at the post office. The line is long. The person ahead of you is moving very slowly. The plastic pincers that grip the stamp paper click.
Click. Click. You look at your watch. You feel a familiar tightness in your chest.
You think you can fix this. If only you were faster, or if only the person in front of you would hurry up. You believe that if you just push hard enough, you can control the outcome of this afternoon. You are wrong.
That is the first belief, and it is a very popular one. We think we are broken because we are not in control. But here is the second belief: almost nothing that happens to you is actually yours to control. That sounds like giving up.
It sounds like lying down and letting life roll over you. It sounds dangerous. But it is not. It is actually quite practical.
It means you stop wasting energy on the weather, on the traffic, on the slow clerk. You stop fighting a river you cannot divert. You can only decide how to float on it. That is not brokenness.
That is the structure of the world. Now, the third belief: you are still responsible for what you make of it. You are not responsible for the stamp, or the line. You are responsible for how you handle it.
You can choose to be angry. You can choose to be bored. You can choose to be curious about the people around you. You can choose to listen to a podcast.
You can choose to close your eyes and breathe. The event itself—the slow clerk, the long line—is not your project. Your project is how you endure it. This is the part that feels hardest.
It is the part where you have to be a creator even when you are the victim. This week we are going to look at three positions that contradict each other, held at once. We are going to look at the belief that people are not born broken, the belief that most of what happens is not yours to control, and the belief that you are still responsible for what you make of it. We are going to look at how to hold them all at the same time.
Thinking that there's someone who will always be there to catch you when you fall will make you not wanting to be free. Being absolutely free means we aren't free if we simply follow scriptures, traditions long practiced, or natural inclination. We're chained, also, to our self-impose immaturity. That sounds like a lot of heavy lifting.
You might be sitting there thinking, "I just wanted to know if I can trust myself to fix my own toaster, not whether I'm chaining myself to immaturity." But here is the thing: freedom is the feeling that you are responsible for every single decision you make. That feels like a trap. It feels heavy.
But it is actually the only way to live without being angry at the world. If you are stuck in the rain, do you scream at the sky, or do you look for shelter? Screaming is easy. It demands nothing of you.
But looking for shelter is a choice, and that choice is what you have, right now. You are holding a heavy suitcase. Do you throw it on the ground and complain that it is heavy, or do you pick it up and walk? The suitcase is the same.
The weight is the same. The only difference is what you are doing with it. Jean-Paul Sartre sat in a café in Paris and watched a waiter who was doing his job too perfectly, and it bothered him for the rest of his life. He saw a man who was pretending to be a waiter, but he was doing it so well he was actually being a slave to the role.
Sartre called this "bad faith." It sounds like a strange word, but it just means lying to yourself about who you are. You are telling yourself that you are just a cog in the machine, that you cannot help it that you are late, that you are just a "bad person" and that is that. You are handing over the steering wheel to the universe and then complaining when you go off the road.
That is bad faith. It is a way of hiding from the terror of being alone with your own freedom. But if you admit that you are free, and that you are the one driving the car, then you cannot blame the road for being bumpy. You can only blame yourself for not wearing your seatbelt.
That is the terrifying, beautiful truth. You are not a victim of your history. You are the author of it.
Fair enough. It sounds like a trap. If I am the author of everything, then the person who cuts me off in traffic is also my author. That is a heavy burden.
It implies that their cruelty is something I made happen, which feels like a violation. It is easy to see why people choose the alternative. It is much safer to believe you are just a broken cog in a machine you didn't build. But there is a reason we are so uncomfortable with that idea.
It is not just fear of responsibility. It is something else. Let us look at the person who cuts me off. He is in a rush.
He is stressed. He is probably late for a meeting he doesn't want to be at. His actions are a mess of poor impulse control and external pressure. He is not a philosophical agent making a choice.
He is a system glitching. Now, the Stoics have this idea of "prohairesis" — which is just a fancy word for your inner choice, the one you actually own. It is the part of you that can say "yes" or "no" to what is happening. You cannot own his prohairesis.
It is full of noise and fear and bad habits. It is not yours. But you can own yours. You can decide, right in that split second, whether you let his bad driving ruin your whole day, or whether you let it be just another annoyance that washes over you like a splash of water.
The car crash is not your fault. The fact that you are screaming at him is your fault. You are the only one who can decide whether to scream. That is the difference between being a victim and being in control.
The event itself—the slow clerk, the traffic, the rude driver—is not your project.
If I were to write my own list of "what I should have known before turning 20," the top of the list would have been Stoicism. It is not a list of rules to follow like a prayer. It is a map of what is yours and what is not. You have to carry the map, but you have no control over the terrain.
Think about a review on the internet. You wrote something. Someone wrote a comment. It is not nice.
You want to delete it. You want to fix it. You want to change the product so it does not look that way. That is fighting the river.
The river is the world, and the comment is a ripple. You cannot stop the ripple. You cannot change the water. You are only the one standing in the stream.
But you can decide where you stand. You can decide to get wet. You can decide to let the cold shock you. Or you can decide to wrap yourself in a coat and walk through it without feeling a thing.
The rain is not yours to control. The wind is not yours to control. Your reaction to the rain is yours. That is where you find the work.
That is where you find the standard. You are building a house. You have a requirement. It is simple.
It is a standard nobody questioned. The standard is: the door must open. There is no other requirement. Nobody asks if the door is beautiful.
Nobody asks if it matches the curtains. It just has to open. You work for three weeks. You measure, you cut, you sand.
You check your work every day. You check it when nobody is looking. Then you put the door on the hinges. You turn the handle.
It does not open. It is stuck. The wood has warped. The requirement is not met.
You are standing there with a door that will not open. Now, what is your project? Is it to blame the wood? Is it to complain that the humidity was too high?
Is it to look at the door and say, "I am broken, I cannot do this"? No. That is the first two beliefs fighting each other. Your project is the third belief.
You are responsible for what you make of it. You have to open that door. You have to find the screw. You have to take the door down.
You have to sand the edge again. You have to put it back up. You have to try again. The door is still stuck, but you are not.
You are the one who is still working. You are the one who is still trying. The difference between a setback that ends a project and one that costs a week is almost never the setback. It is always you.
It is whether you decide to stay in the chair or get up and sand the wood again. You are not broken. The river is just running over you. You are the one who decides if you drown or if you learn to swim.
"To be genuinely free, it would mean that we shall be able to come up with our own rules based on reason, and to be able to follow them rigorously; Being, ALWAYS, thankful for everything around you: Because you 'want to live a life,' and not just to have a life (for which your role is to take it from birth to death)." That means you have to thank the universe for the bad weather, the slow clerk, and the door that won't open. It sounds insane. Why would I thank a rude person?
It doesn't mean you like them. It means you accept the hand you were dealt so you can play the cards you actually have. You stop fighting the river and start swimming in it. But here is the hard part: you have to build your own compass.
You have to write your own rules and actually follow them, even when you are tired and no one is watching. I am writing my rules as I go along, and I am constantly changing them. I am making mistakes every day. If you are holding these three beliefs—no brokenness, no control, total responsibility—and you still want to know why you are unhappy, the answer is usually that you are not following your own rules.
You are following other people's or you are following the river. But if you are writing the rules, the river can only be water. It can only be weather. It can only be a stuck door.