To me, it is a balance of both.

Life is definitely what happens to you. That alone is strikingly important, as much of it is not stuff you have any control over. You are quite literally a victim of most of life.

However, how you react to what you can control is also critical in dealing with it, in that you can identify things you can very much directly affect in some way.

Stoicism includes the ability and skills to tell the difference between the two, coping with the former as best as possible (to retain your mental health), and actively strategizing on how to deal with the latter as effectively as possible in order to minimize any negative outcome or maximize positive outcomes.

Take any temperature you feel comfortable at.

Raise it by 10℃, and consider that temperature. That’s what I feel like at your “comfortable” temp.

Simply put, my body runs super-hot. My ideal temps for various situations tend to be 8-15℃ below the same range of other people.

As in, even normal office temp ranges can make me look like a drowned rat if I engage in any physical effort at all. Even something as simple as moving banker’s boxes around can have me drenched in sweat at “normal” office temps.

I love winter, because I can be out there in -10℃ weather without even a jacket, be shovelling snow, and I can actually exert myself without sweating. Winter is about the only time of the year where I can experience truly comfortable temperatures.

Personally, I prefer Omnivore.

Virtually every single bad adaptation can be directly traced back to studio interference.

Movies like LoTR only happened because the studios thought it would be a colossal flop, and so left the directors and producers alone.

If you want great movies, the studios need to leave the producers and directors the hell alone.