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December 4th

YOU DON’T OWN THAT

“Anything that can be prevented, taken away, or coerced is not a

person’s own—but those things that can’t be blocked are their

own.”

—EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.24.3

he conservationist Daniel O’Brien has said that he doesn’t “own” his
several-thousand-acre buffalo ranch in South Dakota, he just lives there
while the bank lets him make mortgage payments on it. It’s a joke about the
economic realities of ranching, but it also hints at the idea that land doesn’t
belong to one individual, that it will far outlast us and our descendants.
Marcus Aurelius used to say that we don’t own anything and that even our
lives are held in trust.
We may claw and fight and work to own things, but those things can be
taken away in a second. The same goes for other things we like to think are
“ours” but are equally precarious: our status, our physical health or strength,
our relationships. How can these really be ours if something other than us—
fate, bad luck, death, and so on—can dispossess us of them without notice?
So what do we own? Just our lives—and not for long.