It gives you a blueprint of what kinds of things you can expect to be able to change and the limitations you'll face in the attempt.
* Which more in the context of the 12 step program the other person can be yourself. You will have thoughts, impulses, emotions, urges that you can't control but you can control your reaction to them.
Like it or not, but you __can__ control others. This is what advertising is based on, for example.
I use the prayer as a framework when I have to take a mental break and find the discernment between a situation I truly can't change and one I can influence (or, like you pointed out, a response you can control).
Everything we do has limits and obstacles. If you don't feel frustrated, then that's a completely ordinary situation and there's no point in highlighting your "acceptance", is there?
I suppose in tech terms it could be equivalent to "won't fix", but such matters should be swiftly forgotten. If you're experiencing ongoing acceptance, consciously, that's suboptimal and implies you'd still be right to complain.
Thus recommending acceptance to somebody is recommending defeat. The term acceptance entails bottled-up frustration or injustice. It may still be strategically right, but it's a twisted, contingent choice.
I have genetic chronic fatigue and I’m limited in what I can do about it, there is a component of making peace with loss, a radical acceptance of one’s own situation. And there is a component of extreme experimentation, I have done just about all that can be done about it. I have to give up on my dreams of athleticism. Life isn’t fair, it’s life, but I wouldn’t call it an injustice. I think the modern conflation is part of making the personal political.
> But preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them.
Stoicism doesn't answer the question "what can and can't we control" and doesn't claim to. I think the modern neostoicism trend is to make the reader believe that they have little control over daily life, encouraging an almost narcissistic-nihilist response to ongoing events.