Every system of control runs on need.
The employer controls through financial need. The approval-seeker controls through emotional need. The political system controls through the need for safety. The social hierarchy controls through the need to belong.
Remove the need. The control dissolves.
This is why the Stoics and the Vedantic sages were, in different ways, considered dangerous by the establishments of their time. Socrates could not be bribed because he wanted nothing that money could provide. Diogenes lived in a barrel and told Alexander the Great to step out of his sunlight. The Nath yogis wandered without property, without obligation, beyond the reach of any authority that operated through possession and fear.
Epictetus was a slave. His master broke his leg to demonstrate ownership. Epictetus said: you told me it would break, and it broke. What else do you have?
This is not a story about pain tolerance. It is a story about where a man had located his self — so far inside, so beyond the reach of external force, that the external force found nothing to grip.
Vairagya — dispassion, non-attachment — is not the renunciation of desire in the sense of becoming emotionless. It is the gradual recognition, through direct experience, that the things the world uses as leverage over you are not where your actual life lives.
Your actual life lives in the quality of your awareness. In the depth of your attention. In the integrity of your choices when no one is watching and nothing external is at stake.
Those things cannot be taken. Which means you cannot be controlled through them.
The man who needs nothing is not cold. He is often the most generous person in the room — because generosity costs him nothing. He gives freely because he has located abundance somewhere that is not depleted by giving.
Build that location. Everything else follows.