"It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death"

Epictetus redirects attention from the hazards outside us to the disturbance within us. Death and pain belong to the order of nature; they arrive as they will, often without our consent. Fear, by contrast, is a judgment, a story the mind tells about what could happen and what it would mean. That story can swell until it eclipses the event itself, turning an inevitable hardship into a prolonged captivity.

Fear multiplies suffering through anticipation. A medical procedure may last an hour; the dread of it can last weeks and hollow out the days before it. The same pattern appears in public speaking, difficult conversations, career risks: avoidance driven by fear shrinks the sphere of action, leaving the person smaller and less free. Nature delivers one blow; imagination delivers a hundred.

There is also a moral insight at stake. For Stoics, virtue, clear judgment, courage, justice, self-control, is the only genuine good. Death and pain are not goods or evils in themselves; they are materials upon which character works. Fear distorts judgment, tempts compromise, and makes vice seem expedient. Courage is not insensitivity to pain; it is the refusal to let fear dictate what is honorable or rational. To accept mortality and the possibility of pain is to place value where it belongs: in the quality of one’s choices.

Training this stance requires practice. Distinguish what is within control (beliefs, intentions, actions) from what is not (outcomes, others’ opinions, the timing of death). Rehearse adversity in thought to blunt surprise and clarify responses. Embrace modest voluntary discomfort to learn that discomfort need not command. Keep attention in the present slice of time, where tasks are small and agency is real. Use sober language: not catastrophe, but challenge; not doom, but difficulty.

Applied daily, this unhooks life from the tyranny of anticipated misfortune. Freedom arrives not from banishing pain or mortality, but from withdrawing consent from fear.