You Don’t Need To Be Famous To Matter
What Epictetus can teach us about mattering without needing to be seen
There’s a passage in The Enchiridion by Epictetus that jumped out at me. Probably because it feels like a direct response to the world we live in now—one where our value is increasingly measured by visibility.
“Do not fret about your own significance, worrying, ‘I’ll never become famed or renowned; I’m just a nobody from nowhere.’ Is it your business to chase after political power or fame? No. Find your significance within yourself…”
It’s easy to nod along with that in theory. But the practice—really believing that your value doesn’t come from being seen or praised—is another story entirely.
Especially in the era of social media.
It’s never been easier to compare yourself to others; to mistake someone else’s curated visibility for real purpose. And if you’re trying to live with intention, with some sense of alignment or virtue, that comparison can feel even more paralyzing—like you’re falling short not just of visibility, but of usefulness, too.
But Epictetus cuts through that noise with a simple question: What’s actually in your control?
What’s not in your control is whether people like you. Whether your work goes viral. Whether the thing you’re quietly building gets any attention at all. And chasing those things, at the cost of your character or your clarity, won’t actually get you what you’re looking for anyway.
That’s what I keep coming back to.
If you don’t first develop the inner peace, the sense of purpose, the grounding in what really matters… what do you have to give, even if you get everything you think you want?
Epictetus says it clearly:
“Can you really give people happiness and satisfaction—things that are in their own spheres of power, not yours? And can you give someone something that you yourself don’t even have?”
It’s a reminder that lands harder the more I sit with it.
I can’t make anyone else feel secure. I can’t manufacture their sense of meaning. I can’t shortcut their path to clarity.
And trying to do that by compromising my own peace—by abandoning what I know to be right for what might be more impressive—isn’t generous. It’s performative. It might look helpful on the surface, but underneath, it’s hollow.
“Work to acquire the character of a person who attracts good friends, rather than losing your character to gain riches.”
In other words: build yourself into someone that people can count on, not someone who’s just being looked at.
That doesn’t mean we stop striving. Or stop creating. Or stop trying to build things that last. But it does mean we let go of this idea that we have to be public figures to be significant ones.
You are important right where you are, he says.
And I think he’s right.
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