Resist and Persist
Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.
The Discipline of Desire
Resist and Persist (Day 2 of 5)
We begin with desire.
This may seem like a strange place to begin a course on self-discipline. Surely, discipline is about action: getting out of bed, going to the gym, doing the work, refusing temptations, and keeping the promises.
But action is often downstream from something else.
You want to exercise, but you also want to remain comfortable. You want to save money, but you also want what the advertisement has placed in front of you. You want to write, but you also want relief from the discomfort of not knowing what comes next. You want to live according to your own values, but you also want the approval of people whose values may not align with yours.
The problem is not always that we lack desire. Sometimes we have too many desires pulling in different directions.
Epictetus therefore placed the training of desire near the center of philosophical life. Before asking how to get what you want, Stoicism asks a more unsettling question:
What have you decided is worth wanting?
We tend to experience desire as intensely personal: “I want this.”
The sentence seems to settle the matter. But desire does not arrive with a certificate of authenticity.
What we want is shaped by temperament, experience, advertising, culture, comparison, habit, family, status, and the people around us. We learn what a successful person is supposed to own, what a respectable career is supposed to look like, what kind of body should make us confident, how much money should feel like enough, and which accomplishments should make us proud.
Seneca noticed this problem in ancient Rome. In a letter to Lucilius, he warns about the effect of the crowd. After spending time among other people, he says, he often finds himself returning home greedier, more ambitious, and more indulgent than before.
His point is not that other people are corrupt and solitude is pure. It is that influence is often quiet. Standards enter us without announcing themselves.
Someone else receives a promotion, and a job you liked yesterday suddenly feels insufficient. A friend buys a larger house, and your own begins to look smaller. You see enough images of a certain life and eventually stop asking whether you want that life. You simply begin arranging yourself toward it.
This makes desire worth examining—not because social influence makes every desire false, but because the fact that a desire feels like yours does not tell you where it came from or whether it deserves to govern you.
Epictetus opens the Enchiridion with one of Stoicism's foundational distinctions.
“Some things are in our control and others not.”
Our judgments, purposes, desires, and aversions belong, in an important Stoic sense, to the sphere of our agency. Bodies, possessions, reputations, offices, and the actions of other people do not belong to us in the same way.
The distinction is sometimes reduced to a slogan: Focus only on what you can control. But Epictetus is asking something more demanding than that. He is asking us to reconsider where we locate the good.
