We Shouldn't Care

I'm really not sure if I understood these first ten sections but what I understood is that the best thing that we can do is to not care about anything. The author is saying that what makes our lives miserable is when we start caring about different things, and expecting things that aren't up to us. "What upsets people is not things themselves but their judements about the things. For example, death is nothing dreadful, but instead the judgement about death that it is dreadful- that is what is dreadful" (6) What Epictetus is saying is that we also sometimes put many different ideas into one group. We often think of death as a terrible thing, but death itself is not that bad. If somebody instantly dies, for them, it wasn't that bad. When you start judging death, and having feelings and opinions about it, is when it becomes "bad". What this is basically trying to say it that things themselves aren't bad, but when put feeling into them, or expect something, that is when we are mad. "So detach your aversion from everything not up to us, and transfer it to what is against nature. (12) This is another example of him trying to show us that it is better to not have feelings. Epictetus is making us believe that the only hate we should have is towards the things that are against nature. For everything else, we should have no hate and no feeling. Epictetus also talks about not trying to look for something to happen. "Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well." (13) This was strange because I thought of a positive attitude when I read this. Sometimes bad things happen to people, but we have faith and a positive attitude that make us believe that something better will happen. Although many times we don't get what we wanted, looking for a bright future is what keeps us working hard and trying to achieve our goals. I guess that if you have low expectations and don't really care of the future, then you'll never be upset when you don't get the best future. Although I understand where he is coming from, I don't really like that point of view because it's pretty much saying to not have hope for a better future. Although this had made me think about how I see the future, I believe that Epictetus hasn't changed my opinion just yet.