Attachment to external things makes you a slave 

If today is Sunday, there is no point wishing it were Tuesday. No matter how hard you wish it is going to be Sunday. But we fail to realize the same thing is true when you get sick or lose money in the stock market. No matter how hard you wish that you were not sick or had not lost money in the stock market, nothing is going to change. You might as well get on with your life. What we cannot control is nothing to us. Believing that somehow you control externals can harm you. 

Worse still, getting attached to externals makes us a slave of externals. It also makes us a slave for those who control the externals we are after. If you want your job to be 100% secure, you become the slave of the person who has the power to fire you. If you are attached to having a relationship with a person, you become a slave to the other person. If you are after money, the person who controls it will become your master. 

Show me one who is not a slave. One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all are slaves to fear. 

Seneca, Moral Letters, 47.17 

Avoiding external things also makes you a slave 

Being averse to an external is the flipside of being attached to it. When you desperately want to avoid something, it means that you don’t like reality and you want it to go away. Reality doesn’t care to cooperate with what you want. This results in unhappiness. If you hate crowds, you will be unhappy in crowded places. If you detest alcohol, you will be upset by people who drink. To be free, we need to take reality as is. We should neither get carried away by it nor be repulsed by it. Externals are the way they are, whether we like it or not. It doesn’t care for our approval. If it is desirable (such as health, or job), we enjoy it when it comes our way. If not, we don’t miss it. We don’t ‘hate’ any external things. 

Whoever wishes to be free, let them neither wish for anything nor flee from anything that depends on others.; otherwise, they must be a slave. 

Epictetus, Enchiridion 14 

Why we get attached to externals 

We get attached to things because of our judgment that it is good or that it is bad. Suppose you have beautiful painting by a master. If someone steals it you are distressed because you judge it to be precious. How is it different from the reaction of children who take a worthless piece of sea shell, consider it precious and be distressed if it is taken away? When we don’t consider an external thing so special that we get attached to it, we can enjoy it when we have it and yet not be distressed if we lose it. 

Everything depends on our judgement. Why is an expensive designer dress ‘better’ than a regular store-bought dress, if both do the function of a dress equally well and last equally long? Because we judge it to be so. As we look more closely, we realize the value of externals comes from our judgement. We are envious if someone earns more money for the same job we do because we think money to be precious and it defines our worth. If we don’t think that way, then we don’t care what others are paid. If some things look valuable to us, it is because we put those things on a pedestal. Take away that pedestal. It is not any taller. 

It is the same when we view people who are famous as awe-inspiring, people with power as more important, and people with money as worthy of admiration. We make up these things in our minds and then act as though they are real. 

How contemptible are the things we admire – like children who regard every toy as a thing of value … What then… is the difference between us and them except that we elders go crazy over paintings and sculpture, making our folly more expensive. 

Seneca, Moral Letters, 115.8 

 

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