Do you think through?

Once you’ve taken all this into consideration, go and compete if you still want to. If you don’t, your behavior will be comparable to that of children, who at one moment pretend they’re wrestlers and at another gladiators, then they’re blowing trumpets, and then they’re actors in a play. That’s what you’re like as well: at one moment an athlete, at the next a gladiator, then an orator, then a philosopher— without committing yourself wholeheartedly to anything. Like an ape, you imitate every passing thing you see, and one thing after another attracts you. You don’t think through any of your projects or look at them in the round; you act without purpose and without really wanting anything.

Here Epictetus is more poetic, a rare case. It is not that we don't know what he says, but we don't think through. Likewise the narrator of Proust lives his frivolous life without ever beginning his true life of vocation. Even if you don’t have any vocation or just act “without purpose”, still you must think through your every action unless you want to be a plaything of …