The Enchiridion By Epictetus Analysis

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To begin with on a long enough timeline, everything comes to an end. The happiness you felt yesterday all of a sudden ended, the pain you might feel tomorrow will sooner or later end. Every time it rains, it stops raining and every time you get injured, you heal. You are reminded of this everyday. Although this is true, the first thing to remember is that your life will eventually end. Nothing lasts forever, and everything is temporary. That’s one of the many things about life The Enchiridion by Epictetus is trying to explain to its readers. The reading says not to get used to things and people, because they all come and go and we will have to let them go (1). And yet we live our lives like the finest things that happen to us will never end …show more content…

Also, the reading states that we get attached to things differently than we do to items (3). Generally speaking we put things into categories, where there is multiple of everything and we can easily replace it. However, we care for every human being individually. Everyone is different and we cannot get a duplicate of someone when they die. In life we learn to believe many things but the most important is that everything comes to an end. Every time somebody dies that is when we are constantly being reminded of this belief, because death is the unavoidable and inescapable conclusion to life. “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen” (8). This quote illustrates that worrying about the things we do not have, often makes us overlook the great things we have (8). It is important to realize that many people are too busy being sad about things they cannot have and competing with others. However, they don’t realize that there are a lot of people who don’t even have as much as they do. Under those circumstances individuals become more and more materialistic as they become more

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