A. A . Long on Fate Vs Free Will - Meet the Modern Stoics

Fascinating, and perhaps the most paradoxical thing about Stoicism is that on the one hand, it believes fervently in causal determinism, that everything actually in nature is structured and nothing happens at random. And yet at the same time, we are delegated this enormous amount of capacity to organize our own lives. And I think that's what is so centrally important about Stoicism today. The idea that to live effectively, both, you know, morally and and happily is a question of how you dispose yourself to the world. It's a creative aspect. I think I like that aspect of, you know, your own approach. It's not being reactive. It's not, oh well, we're determined by the conditions outside. We are determined, of course, in a kind of spatio-temporal sense, but what we make of our inner life is left entirely up to us, which is not to say that it's a subjective philosophy. There is an appropriate way to be. But we have to discover that for ourselves. I think that's terribly important.