The Discipline of Desire
This week you're learning about the Discipline of Desire, which Epictetus called one of the three core fields of philosophical training. The idea is straightforward but demanding: your desires and aversions (the things you reach toward and the things you recoil from) are constantly pulling you around, and unless you train them, they will run your life. The goal is not to kill all desire but to want the right things in the right way, so that you are never at the mercy of outcomes you cannot control.
Passage
Remember that the promise of desire is the attainment of what you desire, that of aversion is not to fall into what is avoided, and that he who fails in his desire is unfortunate, while he who falls into what he would avoid experiences misfortune. If, then, you avoid only what is unnatural among those things which are under your control, you will fall into none of the things which you avoid; but if you try to avoid disease, or death, or poverty, you will experience misfortune. Withdraw, therefore, your aversion from all the matters that are not under our control, and transfer it to what is unnatural among those which are under our control. But for the time being remove utterly your desire; for if you desire some one of the things that are not under our control you are bound to be unfortunate; and, at the same time, not one of the things that are under our control, which it would be excellent for you to desire, is within your grasp. But employ only choice and refusal, and these too but lightly, and with reservations, and without straining.
— Epictetus, Handbook 2
Reflection
Today Epictetus spells out the mechanics of what the Discipline of Desire is actually protecting you from. Desire, when it reaches toward things outside your control, creates a trap: you will sometimes fail to get what you want, and sometimes land exactly in what you feared, and both outcomes produce real suffering. His prescription is precise: transfer your aversion away from externals like poverty, illness, or death, and point it only at things within your own character, specifically acting against your own values. As for desire, he says something radical: drop it altogether for now. Not forever, but while you are still learning to distinguish what is truly in your power from what is not.
Go deeper
Which fear, specifically, is currently shaping your decisions more than you would like to admit, and what external thing is that fear pointed at?
Practice
Two Columns
Draw a line down a page. Label the left column 'Outside my control' and the right column 'Inside my control.' Take one current worry or craving and break it apart: which pieces belong on which side? Notice how much of your emotional energy is sitting in the left column. Spend 7 minutes on this.