Epictetus: Unstuck in Time?

"You are foolish if you want your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, since you are wanting things to be up to you that are not up to you, and things to be yours that are not yours." sec. 4. This is a perfect example of Epictetus's way of thinking compared to that of the Tralfamadorians in Slaughter House 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. Both of them agree in the fact that things are the way they are because thats how it's supposed to be and that they were always meant to be like that. No one will ever change something that is supposed to be, even while attempting to try and change something thinking that that way the outcome may change, since even that is something that was meant to happen. So this man has the idea of things being something because they simply are a lot before Vonnegut wrote Slaughter House 5. In reality, this way of thinking was actually the normal way of thinking before modern times.

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Since ancient times people had the idea that fate existed, and that everyone was revolving around it. There were no ideas of making your own reality until people like Jean Paul Sartre appeared and introduced them to the public. The idea of religions such as Catholicism spread word that people suffered certain things because they were destined to do that. Epictetus, living during Roman times lived with a Catholic surrounding, which maybe influenced him to think in that matter. But then why does Vonnegut refer back to a way of thinking that comes from way back? After living such horrible things as the ones he lived during the war, it is very possible for him to have some sort of trauma with it. What we as humans usually do when we have a trauma is that we set our minds to an idea which may free us from it. Vonnegut may have used this old excuse for calming himself down about the trauma he had experienced, since thoughts such as this one that are used in the past are usually used to split reality into things people like. Even when Epictetus uses it, it seems to fill that purpose, for it takes pain away from whoever is reading the handbook about the loss of a lost one by telling them that it's fate.