Fire And Ice

What an enormous change. Reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut to reading Epictetus is a huge change. We come from a war/sci-fi novel from the XX century to a handbook from about the first century. We come from a book with characters and a story to simply one guy talking to you about how life is. It definately is a fire to ice, differenct in all aspects but both are pretty enjoyable in their own way.
He actually gives us some pretty cool advice. In fact he tells us things about life that are very ture and intaresting to know. According to Epictetus, “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about things… let us blame someone else but rather ourselves.”(5) He tells us so many things that ere pretty interesting but this one in particular was very meaningful to me. It is completely true that we don’t get angry at things but we get angry because of the way we look at things. For example I don’t get angry about getting a bad grade, I get angry because to my judgement it is very wrong to get a bad grade and therefore y get very angry at it. Besides it is work that I cant blame anybody but me for doing it poorly. This is what Epictetus tells us about death. The thing that is cruel and gruesome is not death but our perception of it. Our perception is our judgement and that is what actually makes us suffer and mourn. Epictetus says many ture things about life. He later says that educated people don't blame anybody nor themselves. They apparently judge their judgement of things since without it nothing would have changed.