5. Change What You Blame

This one sentence is the core of Stoic thought. Most of the book rests on it. Epictetus asks you to change what you blame.

People are not upset by things themselves.

They are upset by the ideas and judgments they form about those things.

Death, for instance, is not terrible. If it were, it would have seemed terrible to Socrates. The terror lies in our idea that death is terrible.

Whenever we are blocked, or upset, or grieved, we should never blame other people. We should look at our own judgments.

The untrained person blames others for the bad state he is in. The person starting to learn blames himself. The person who has truly learned blames neither others nor himself.

What this means. The event is one thing. Your story about the event is another. Change the story and you change what the event does to you.