Stoicism teaches that we can’t control or rely on anything outside what Epictetus called our “reasoned choice”—our ability to use our reason to choose how we categorize, respond, and reorient ourselves to external events.

What are we to do, then? To make the best of what lies within our power, and deal with everything else as it comes. ‘How does it come, then?’ As God wills.

Attaining complete peace of mind is for Spinoza the true religious salvation, which makes us accept everything that happens to us as necessary rather than as something that we can change. The problem with such peace of mind, as Hegel points out, is that it is completely empty. The Stoic says that he is committed to “the true,” “the good,” and “the