Latest / The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks
The Stoic Reframe to Deal with Loss of Any Kind
The Stoics had a hard but freeing way of thinking about loss. Nothing is really yours. Everything you enjoy is on loan, and grief hurts less when you stop treating what was taken as something you owned outright.
This episode works from one of the more confronting lines in Epictetus:
“Under no circumstances ever say ‘I have lost something,’ only ‘I returned it.’ Did a child of yours die? No, it was returned. Your wife died? No, she was returned. ‘My land was confiscated.’ No, it too was returned.”
It is a lot to sit with. I try to take it seriously without pretending it makes loss painless…
The skinny
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