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🎯 The Beginning Is Mostly Luck. The End Is Mostly Choices. — A Stoic Reflection
Life often opens not with design, but with chance. Where you’re born, who your parents are, the era you live in, even your name — these are cards dealt by fortune. As the quote goes, “The beginning is mostly luck. The end is mostly choices.”
This simple yet profound statement aligns deeply with the timeless teachings of Stoic philosophy, which urges us to distinguish between what we can control and what we cannot. Epictetus once said:
“Some things are up to us and some things are not.”
The beginning of your life? Not up to you.
The ending — how you live, how you respond, how you shape your character? Entirely your responsibility.
🎲 The Role of Luck: What Fortune Gives Us
When we’re young, we are passengers. Life happens to us. We’re born into a family, a culture, a body — all without consent. We don’t choose whether we grow up in wealth or poverty, health or illness, peace or war. These initial conditions are products of chance, or as the Stoics would say, the workings of Fortuna — the unpredictable goddess of fate.
But the Stoics never resented luck. Marcus Aurelius, who ruled an empire yet faced unimaginable grief and…
