Meditations

Author: Marcus Aurelius

This is the kind of book they say you should carry with you and read and ponder over a prolonged period of time. I chose to read through it in about a week.

Meditations was never meant to be published, it was Marcus Aurelius personal journal that contained his thoughts about his personal life and career as the emperor of Rome.

With most books, I do not feel guilty about putting them down half way through, or giving them up early. With the world renowned classics, I feel a bit guilty. I certainly did not devote the time or headspace to this book that it deserves, but I also wasn’t that interested in the subject matter, so why should I have dwelled on it for long?

There seems to be a bit of a resurgence in stoic philosophy recently. I’ve seen a number of podcasts pop up about it, and it seems to be popular in the tech business world (which is highly prone to new fads like dopamine fasting, so stoicism will be out the door soon enough). There have also been popular books written about it recently like Lives of the Stoics. I find some of the philosophy of stoicism interesting and noteworthy. I like the emphasis on living an ethical life and doing your absolute best to contribute positively to society, while also keeping in mind that what happens happens and is largely out of our control so all we can manage is how we respond. A big part of stoicism is that being overly emotional or giving into our emotions leads to bad decisions, and we should try and view things more pragmatically – I exhibit these traits naturally as I tend not to be too emotional of a person, so I align with that element of it as well. There is a good site here that gets into the philosophy in a simple way. Here is a nice cheat sheet the site I linked provided on the topic.

It’s hard to disagree on the surface on the virtue of practicing many of the things written on this cheat sheet. I diverge a bit on how it arrives at these points, why it feels they are the most important, how it defines things like good/bad/right/wrong/virtue, what it defines as truth, and its views on the individual among other things.