Everything You Need to Know about the Good Life in 32 Minutes

Because some people take really good class notes

These may be the most important class notes in history.

Actually, I’d call Arrian’s Enchiridion a “greatest hits” notes compilation — the distillation of the philosopher Epictetus’s most powerful ideas into 6,490 words.

If you read at the average rate of 28 words/minute, it’ll take 32 minutes to whip through the whole thing. It’s a half-hour that may change your life.

A Handbook for the Ages

Enchiridion means “handbook,” in ancient Greek. Arrian intended it as a small scroll he could carry around and use as a quick reference when life got tough. He’d recorded Epictetus's lectures verbatim as a young man and probably compressed them soon after. Acquaintances obtained copies at some point, and they soon spread around the Mediterranean.

It was intended as a refresher rather than an introduction, but the ideas are so simple and powerful that most passages will hit home even if you have no exposure to the Stoic philosophy Epictetus expounds.

My own endorsement means little. What should carry weight is that the Enchiridion was beloved enough to survive the Dark Ages in numerous hand-written manuscripts. For context, at one point only a single copy of Marcus Aurelius’s beloved Meditations survived, and many famous classical texts had less than three manuscripts make it through the great filter of the medieval period.

But so many pagans and Christians embraced the Enchiridion’s practical wisdom that the work’s survival was never in doubt. More than a hundred handwritten manuscripts still exist, the oldest more than 800 years old.

A Handbook for Doers

The Enchiridion is a handbook for tranquility, but not for quietism or retreat.

Arrian himself illustrates this. He was a highly educated 2nd-century Renaissance man, and he loved philosophy and books. But he also served three emperors as a civil servant, topographer, problem solver, and soldier.

He was the governor of Cappadocia, and when Alani horse nomads poured out of the Caucasus, burning and pillaging Roman towns, the Emperor Hadrian entrusted the response to him. Arrian led his legionaries into the field and used an ingenious strategy of fortified strongholds and calculated maneuvering to neutralize the horse warrior’s mobility advantage. He quickly routed the Alani and drove them from Roman territory.

His political jockeying, risky military ventures, and naval explorations must have been stressful, and the philosophy Arrian learned as a young man steadied him. It was a counterweight to chaos.

A Counterweight to Today

Modern philosophy is often theoretical. What can average people do with it? Epictetus’s ideas are different because they’re practical and applicable.

Think of the Enchiridion as an antidote to the hysterics gripping young Americans, which Jonathan Haidt laid out in The Anxious Generation.

America’s youth have been stewing in a philosophy of disempowerment and anxiety for 15 years. It’s taught them that the only way they can live is to control the uncontrollable. Discordant ideas should be silenced. Disagreeable people should be banned. The results aren’t pretty.

“Who is your master? Anyone who has control over things upon which you’ve set your heart, or over things which you seek to avoid.” — Epictetus

The enchiridion is a timeless counterweight to this approach. It teaches us to focus on controllable matters and exclude almost everything else from our minds. I wish I’d learned its insights as a child, and think it should be taught in every school.

Very few things help modern people manage their inner lives. Many people encounter no practical instructions for doing so. The Enchiridion changes that.

Though it can be read in 32 minutes, the ideas are worth a lifetime’s contemplation and internalization.

The Best Translation:

Some versions of the Enchiridion are available as stand-alone books, and there are some creaky out-of-copyright translations available for free online.

But my two favorite translations include the book alongside Epictetus’s longer work, The Discourses.

The Robin Hard and Robin Waterfield Translations are excellent and not dramatically different. Both contain good explanatory notes and introductions to Epictetus and his philosophy.

Give one a try. As Epictetus asked his students, “How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?”

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