I was on-call last week when everything went sideways. Database replication lag, cascading failures, the works. At 2 AM I caught myself spiraling—heart racing, catastrophizing, mentally drafting my resignation letter.

Then I remembered something from Marcus Aurelius.

“Focus on What You Control”

This one line has saved my sanity more times than any debugging technique.

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor who spent his nights writing private notes to himself—what we now call Meditations.1 The Meditations were never intended for publication. They’re essentially Marcus’s private journal, written in Greek during military campaigns. The intimate, unpolished quality is part of their power. Between running an empire and fighting wars, he kept coming back to the same idea: distinguish between what’s in your power and what isn’t.

The database being down? Not in my power. My response to it? Fully in my power.

Sounds simple. It’s not. But it’s the difference between productive action and useless panic.

The Dichotomy of Control

The Stoics called this the dichotomy of control—perhaps their most practical teaching.2 Epictetus formalized this in the Enchiridion (c. 125 CE): “Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing.”

In on-call terms:

In your control:

  • Your diagnostic process
  • How quickly you escalate
  • Your communication with stakeholders
  • Whether you take breaks to think clearly
  • Your emotional response

Not in your control:

  • Whether the fix works on the first try
  • How long the outage lasts
  • How users react
  • What your manager thinks
  • Legacy code decisions made years ago

The anxiety comes from treating the second list as if it were the first.

My 2 AM Mindset Shift

So there I was, staring at dashboards, watching error rates spike. Old me would’ve been consumed by the outcome. If I don’t fix this, we lose money. If I don’t fix this, I look incompetent. If I don’t fix this…

New me (trying, anyway): What’s the next right action? What can I actually do right now?

The anxiety didn’t disappear. But it got quieter. I stopped refreshing the error dashboard every three seconds and actually focused on the problem.3 There’s neuroscience here too. Rumination activates the default mode network; focused action activates the task-positive network. You can’t fully engage both at once. Action is literally an antidote to anxiety.

The fix came 40 minutes later. It would’ve come 40 minutes later either way. The only difference was whether I spent that 40 minutes panicking or working.

Detachment Is Not Apathy

This gets misunderstood constantly. The Stoics weren’t telling you not to care. Caring is fine. Effort is essential.

Detachment means not letting the outcome control your mental state. It means not tying your self-worth to whether the deploy succeeds. It means understanding that you’re not your last incident report.4 The Stoic term is apatheia—often mistranslated as “apathy.” It actually means freedom from destructive passions, not absence of all emotion. The Stoics valued joy, love, and appropriate concern.

Epictetus put it bluntly: “It’s not things that upset us, but our judgments about things.”

The database being down is a fact. My story about what it means—that I’m a fraud, that I’m going to get fired, that everything is ruined—that’s just my brain making stuff up.

Negative Visualization

The Stoics practiced premeditatio malorum—deliberately imagining things going wrong.5 Seneca recommended this practice in his Letters to Lucilius. Modern psychology calls it “defensive pessimism” and research suggests it can reduce anxiety for some personality types.

This sounds morbid, but it’s actually liberating. Before on-call:

  • Accept that something will probably break
  • Imagine the worst-case scenario
  • Realize you’d survive it
  • Now the actual incident feels manageable by comparison

When you’ve already mentally rehearsed the disaster, the reality is often less scary.

Two Thousand Years, Same Answer

What’s wild is how many traditions arrived at similar conclusions. The Stoics in Rome. Buddhist non-attachment in the East. The Serenity Prayer in Western recovery programs.6 “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr (1932), though often attributed to earlier sources.

Different cultures, same insight: your mind is the variable you can actually control.

Practical Application

I’m not saying I’ve achieved enlightenment. Last month I definitely yelled at my laptop during a particularly stupid bug.

But here’s what actually helps:

Before on-call rotation:

  • Accept that something will probably break
  • It’s not personal—systems fail, that’s why we have on-call
  • My job is to respond well, not to be perfect

During an incident:

  • What is the next action? Not “how do I fix everything”—what’s the ONE next step?
  • Breathe. Seriously. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
  • Communicate early: “I’m investigating” buys you time and reduces pressure

After an incident:

  • Blameless postmortems, but actually blameless, including toward myself
  • What would I tell a friend in this situation?
  • The system is down. Users are affected. AND I am still a competent person who made reasonable decisions.

Amor Fati

The Stoics had a phrase: amor fati—love of fate. Not just accepting what happens, but embracing it as necessary for who you’re becoming.7 Nietzsche later adopted this phrase, though with a different emphasis. For the Stoics, it was about acceptance; for Nietzsche, it was about affirmation and life-saying.

That 2 AM incident? It taught me something about database connection pooling I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. The stress was real, but so was the growth.

The Point

I still get paged at 3 AM sometimes. I still feel that spike of adrenaline when the alert comes in. But now I try to remember: this is just work to be done. I’ll do my best. The outcome will be what it is.

And then I’ll go back to sleep.

Further Reading

  • Aurelius, Marcus (170). Meditations — Start with the Gregory Hays translation. Short, practical, surprisingly modern.
  • Epictetus (125). Enchiridion (The Handbook) — Even shorter. The concentrated essence of Stoic practice.
  • Holiday, Ryan (2014). The Obstacle Is the Way — Modern application of Stoic principles, if the ancient texts feel too dense.
  • Irvine, William (2008). A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy — Academic but accessible introduction.

Changelog

  • 2026-01-06: Initial draft
  • 2026-01-29: Published. Added citations, sidenotes on Stoic concepts, expanded the dichotomy of control section, added Further Reading