Agency

Dichotomy of control:
what is up to you

The dichotomy of control is the Stoic rule of sorting things into what is up to you (judgements, choices, actions) and what is not, and working only on the first. Most of the trouble comes from the word “control”, which Epictetus did not use, and from things that sit in between: a job application, a diagnosis, a chatbot’s answer. If you came for the exercise, the two-column sheet is here.

What does Epictetus actually say?

Epictetus opens the Enchiridion (the “Handbook”) by dividing everything that exists into what is “up to us” and what is not. The Greek is eph’ hēmin, literally “on us” (Greek text at Perseus). The first sentence in four public-domain translations:

Then come two lists. Up to us, in Oldfather’s words: “conception, choice, desire, aversion”, in short everything that is our own doing. Not up to us: “our body, our property, reputation, office”. That is stricter than most summaries: health, salary and reputation are all on the far side. The paragraph ends with a test for anything that upsets you: ask which side it belongs to, and if it is not yours, have the answer ready, “It is nothing to me.”

Epictetus was born in the 50s CE at Hierapolis in Asia Minor, was enslaved to an official at Nero’s court, and later ran a school at Nicopolis in Greece until his death around 135 (Graver, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). His pupil Arrian wrote down the Discourses; the Enchiridion is a short digest of them.

Where does the name “dichotomy of control” come from?

The name “dichotomy of control” is modern: it is the title of chapter 5 of William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life (Oxford University Press, 2009). A review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review the same year still treats it as his term, a technique Irvine “calls” the dichotomy of control (BMCR 2009.09.28). It is the earliest use we found for the Stoic rule (the bare phrase is older in other fields), so we say popularised, not coined.

The word “control” took hold late. In the first sentence, the translators we checked from Carter (1758) to Matheson (1916) wrote “in our power”; Oldfather made “under our control” the standing phrase in the Loeb edition of 1925-1928. The word itself was not new: T. W. Higginson’s version (revised edition, 1890) already has “things which you can control” in section 2 (Wikisource). A trap when quoting: a widely copied online text labelled as Carter’s reads “in our control” (Internet Classics Archive), while the 1759 printing of her translation reads “in our Power” (Wikisource).

What is the trichotomy of control, and what do critics say?

The trichotomy of control is Irvine’s 2009 revision: it adds a third group, things over which you have some control but not complete control. In the BMCR summary, winning a tennis match is partly within your control; for such things Irvine advises internal goals (play as well as you can) in place of external ones (win).

Critics inside modern Stoicism reply that the problem is the English word: the division is about what depends on you alone, not about control (Michael Tremblay, 2021), and it does not make outside things unimportant (Gregory Sadler, 2025).

Epictetus has his own answer, and it is not a third category. In Discourses 2.5 he compares life to dice: you cannot know what will fall, but “to make a careful and skilful use of what has fallen, that is now my task” (Oldfather 1925). In the same chapter he names what is on your side: prohairesis, which Oldfather renders “moral choice” (Greek at Perseus). A “partly controlled” thing is split in two: your part on one side, the result on the other. The older Stoic picture of the same cut is the archer in Cicero’s De finibus (3.22): his end is to do all he can to aim straight, while actually hitting the mark is “to be chosen” but not “to be desired” (Rackham 1914).

What are examples of the dichotomy of control?

An example of the dichotomy of control has two halves: the part you do, and the result that also depends on someone or something else. The rows are ours; Epictetus himself would count only the choice to act.

“Your thoughts”, a staple of such lists, is too broad: your side holds the judgement you make, not every thought that turns up.

How does the dichotomy of control apply when you work with AI?

When you work with an AI model, three things are up to you: the question you ask, the check you run on the reply, and the decision you take. The reply itself is not.

Epictetus makes a close point in Discourses 1.1. If you are writing to a friend, the art of grammar will tell you what to write; “yet whether or no you are to write to your friend at all, the art of grammar will not tell” (Oldfather 1925). The skill answers how. Whether, and to what end, stays with you.

This site draws the same line on human agency in the AI age: hand over execution, hand over the input to your judgement but not the output, keep intention. The five questions before you ask AI are the left column in practice: your own answer first, then the model, then one line on whether the reply changed your position or only your confidence. Their question 2 also uses two columns, facts and assumptions; that is a different sort from this one.

How do you practise it in five minutes?

To practise the dichotomy of control, take one thing that is bothering you and sort it on paper into two columns, splitting every mixed item into your part and the result. Two steps carry the weight: the cut in step 3 and the date in step 5.

1. Name it. One sentence: what is bothering you today. One thing, not your life.
2. Draw two columns. “Up to me” and “Not up to me”. One item per line.
3. Split the mixed ones. If an item needs someone else’s yes, cut it in two. “Get the contract” becomes “send the offer by Thursday” (left) and “they sign” (right).
4. Pick one line on the left that you can start in ten minutes. Write when.
5. Date the right. Next to each line, the day you will look again. Until then it is not your work.

Why it should help. This is our reasoning, not a tested result. A list on paper is finite, while a worry in the head repeats. A mixed item cannot be acted on until it is cut, and the cut usually leaves a small task on the left. A date on the right is permission to stop checking.

Where it stops. It sorts; it does not solve. The usual mistake is a result written on the left (“make her agree”) or your own part on the right (“nothing I can do”).

Is there evidence that it works?

There is early evidence for Stoic training packages, from small studies, and none we found for the two-column sort tested alone.

• Brown and colleagues, 2022. 24 medical students, 12 days of online Stoic training, measured before and after: resilience scores rose (d = 0.50, p = 0.021). Does not show cause: there was no control group, and the authors call the quantitative results mixed and name the small sample and self-selection.
• MacLellan and Derakshan, 2021. 45 high worriers randomised to three groups (about 15 each), 8 sessions: the abstract reports significant effects of Stoic training on rumination and self-efficacy. We read the abstract only; it does not say what happened to anxiety.

Both tested several exercises together. Locus of control, a neighbouring idea from psychology (Rotter 1966), is a different thing: a general expectation, measured by questionnaire, about whether what happens to you follows from your own behaviour or from outside forces. It describes a person; the dichotomy sorts one situation. More on sense of agency.

What does this not promise?

The dichotomy of control does not promise calm, results or relief from anxiety; it gives a clearer list of what is yours to do.

• It is not a treatment. If worry is constant, or stops you sleeping or working, talk to a doctor or a licensed therapist.
• It is not resignation. “Not up to me” describes the result, never your part. A wrong stays wrong; what you do about it is on the left.
• It is not the Serenity Prayer. That is a twentieth-century Christian text. According to Quote Investigator, citing Fred R. Shapiro, its earliest trace is a diary entry of 31 October 1932 crediting part of it to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prayer sorts things by whether they can be changed; Epictetus by whose doing they are.

What does this have to do with the Hermetic texts?

Epictetus was a Stoic, not a Hermetist, and the Hermetic texts are not Stoic; the two meet on one question, how much of a life is a person’s own doing. Epictetus taught until about 135 CE. The Corpus Hermeticum is a set of Greek treatises written in Roman Egypt around 100 to 300 CE. We know of no evidence that either read the other.

One treatise draws a similar line. In Corpus Hermeticum IV, mind is set out as a prize for those who choose it, and Hermes tells his son, in G. R. S. Mead’s translation of 1906: “what comes from God hath been and will be ours; but that which is dependent on ourselves, let this press onward and have no delay” (§8, vol. II, p. 89). The shape is alike, the content is not: for Epictetus it is the use of judgement in every ordinary event, in treatise IV one choice between mind and the pleasures of the body. We read both as old statements of a question, not as proof that any exercise works.

Key facts

Source	Epictetus, Enchiridion 1; Discourses 1.1, 2.5
Epictetus	Born 50s CE, died c. 135; written down by Arrian
Greek phrase	eph’ hēmin: up to us
“Control”	First sentence: Oldfather, 1928 (Loeb); before him “power”
Modern label	Popularised by W. B. Irvine, 2009; his trichotomy adds partial control
Checked	9 November 2026

Fair questions

What is the dichotomy of control in simple terms?

It is the Stoic rule of sorting things into what is up to you, meaning your judgements, choices and actions, and what is not, and putting your effort into the first group. It comes from the opening of the Enchiridion of Epictetus.

Who came up with the dichotomy of control?

The rule in this form is from Epictetus, a Stoic teacher who died around 135 CE; his pupil Arrian wrote it down. The English name is modern: it is a chapter title in William B. Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life (2009), the earliest use we found for this rule.

What is an example of the dichotomy of control?

A job application. The letter and the follow-up are up to you; what the employer decides is not. The useful step is splitting a mixed thing like this into its two halves.

What is the difference between the dichotomy and the trichotomy of control?

The dichotomy has two groups, up to you and not up to you. The trichotomy, proposed by William B. Irvine in 2009, adds a third: things you influence but do not decide, for which he advises goals about your own effort.

Is the dichotomy of control the same as the Serenity Prayer?

No. The prayer is a twentieth-century Christian text attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, with an earliest known trace in a diary entry of 31 October 1932. It sorts things by whether they can be changed; Epictetus sorts them by whose doing they are.

Sources & further reading

• W. A. Oldfather (trans.), Epictetus, Loeb Classical Library, vol. I (1925), vol. II (1928): Encheiridion 1, Discourses 1.1, 2.5; Wikisource.
• P. E. Matheson (trans.), Epictetus: The Discourses and Manual (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), vol. II, p. 213; Internet Archive.
• George Long (trans.), The Discourses of Epictetus (1877); Wikisource.
• Elizabeth Carter (trans.), All the Works of Epictetus (London, 1758; Dublin printing of 1759), p. 387; Wikisource. Compare the Internet Classics Archive text, and T. W. Higginson’s version (new and revised edition, New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1890), Wikisource.
• Greek: Epicteti Dissertationes, ed. H. Schenkl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1916); Perseus. Cicero, De finibus 3.22, trans. H. Rackham (Loeb, 1914); Internet Archive.
• Margaret Graver, “Epictetus”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008, revised 2025); plato.stanford.edu.
• William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 5, from p. 85; Internet Archive record (checked by full-text search; not read in full).
• Review of Irvine, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.09.28.
• Michael Tremblay (30 January 2021) and Gregory Sadler (14 May 2025), essays at Modern Stoicism.
• Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Serenity Prayer” (2019, updated 2025), reporting Fred R. Shapiro’s research.
• J. B. Rotter, Psychological Monographs 80(1), 1-28 (1966), doi:10.1037/h0092976 (record checked; text paywalled).
• M. E. L. Brown and colleagues, BMC Medical Education 22, 340 (2022), doi:10.1186/s12909-022-03391-x; A. MacLellan and N. Derakshan, Cognitive Therapy and Research 45(4), 730-744 (2021), doi:10.1007/s10608-020-10183-4 (abstract only; author manuscript at Birkbeck).
• G. R. S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London, 1906), p. 89; Internet Archive.
• The two-column sheet is our own arrangement. It is not a treatment and makes no therapeutic claim.