A Stoic-flavored fantasy that I long mistook for reality will be familiar to many readers. It goes like this. There exists a clear boundary between our internal world and the external one; with effort we can be sovereign masters of our internal world, even as we learn to accept that much in the external world is outside our control. This much of the story is plausible. The fantasy comes if we take the next step and imagine that true self-mastery means whatever lies outside of us is incapable of affecting us.