A rude comment can ruin an otherwise good afternoon, replaying in your head long after the person who said it has moved on and forgotten it entirely. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, built an entire framework around exactly that gap. "Any person capable of angering you becomes your master," the line goes. "He can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him." It reframes something that feels automatic, getting angry at someone else's behaviour, as a choice made somewhere along the way, even if that choice happens almost instantly. The idea is unsettling at first, because it puts the responsibility back on the person feeling the anger rather than the one who caused it, but that is exactly where the usefulness of the whole idea actually sits.
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