Marcus Aurelius — The Emperor Who Wrote to Himself

Day 4 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series

The Meditations was never meant to be read.

That’s the first thing to understand about it.

Marcus Aurelius didn’t write it for publication.

He didn’t write it to instruct anyone or to build a reputation as a philosopher.

He wrote it to himself,  to argue with himself, to remind himself of things he kept forgetting, to try again tomorrow at the things he’d failed at today.

It’s the most honest book in the Western philosophical tradition, and that honesty is inseparable from the fact that he never intended anyone to see it.

Marcus became Roman Emperor in 161 AD, at a time when the empire was stretched thin, wars on multiple borders, plague spreading through the legions, administrative corruption everywhere he looked.

He ruled for nearly two decades, and by most historical accounts he ruled well.

He freed many slaves, reformed the legal treatment of the most vulnerable, and was, by the standards of his time and position, unusually just.

He was also, by his own account in these private journals, constantly failing to be the person he wanted to be.

He wrote about waking up and not wanting to get out of bed.
About feeling irritated by the people he had to manage.
About the pull of comfort and ease when he knew he should be working.
About anger he couldn’t always contain.
About the fear of death he tried to reason his way through and sometimes couldn’t.

He was emperor of Rome, writing in his private notebook that he needed to do better.

There’s something almost unbearably human about that.

What he came back to, again and again, was the dichotomy of control and the brevity of everything.

He would write about the great men of history, Hadrian, Augustus, Caesar, and note that they were gone, their empires crumbled, their achievements forgotten.

And then he would ask himself: why are you so attached to your own reputation?

Why do you care what this person thinks of you?

You’ll both be dead inside a century.

This sounds like nihilism.

It isn’t.

Marcus used the shortness of life not as an argument for despair but as an argument for focus.

If everything external is temporary and ultimately unimportant, then what matters is how you live right now, whether you acted justly today, whether you were kind to the people in front of you, whether you did the work that was yours to do.

For vegans, Marcus offers a particular kind of companionship

He was someone trying to act ethically in a world built on exploitation, the Roman economy ran on slavery, while knowing that he couldn’t immediately dismantle the systems he’d inherited, and while being aware that his own privilege implicated him in those systems.

He didn’t resolve that tension.

He lived inside it, trying to do better where he could, holding his values in circumstances that made them difficult to keep.

That’s a familiar position.

The specific grief of paying attention to animal agriculture, really paying attention, is that you can see the scale of the harm clearly, and you can also see how small your individual action is in relation to it.

You went vegan.

The industry didn’t notice.

The statistics didn’t move.

The suffering continued.

Marcus would have recognised that grief.

And his answer would have been the same one he gave himself, on the nights when the empire felt too large and his own mortality too close: do what is yours to do, with the people in front of you, in the time you have.

The outcome is not yours.

The action is.

“Do not indulge in dreams of what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do have, and then thankfully remember how eagerly you would have sought them if they were not yours already.” — Marcus Aurelius

That’s not resignation.

That’s the disciplined refusal to let what you lack consume what you have.

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Practice for today

Read Book 2 of the Meditations, it’s short, maybe ten paragraphs.
Pick one passage that lands for you.
Write it out by hand.
Then ask yourself: why did this one hit differently from the others?