T

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.