Donald Robertson

Wealth does not bring about virtue, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively

“It’s not things that upset me but my judgments about them.”

Marcus Aurelius could easily have said those words in reference to the Stoic Zeus. They remind us that nothing is certain in life. Nothing is entirely under your control, except your own volition. Always accepting this and preparing yourself in advance to meet both success and failure with equanimity can help you avoid feeling angry, surprised, or frustrated when events don’t turn out as you might have wished.

Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.8

Marcus tells himself that he doesn’t literally need to get away from it all because true inner peace comes from the nature of our thoughts rather than pleasant natural surroundings.

In fact, everything that troubles us here is just as it would be on a hilltop, by the seashore, or anywhere else—what matters is how we choose to view it.10 The Stoic can live with contentment and joy in his heart this way, even if men are against him and his physical environment is torturous. Wherever we find ourselves, our judgments are still free, and they are the seat of our passions.

1. Everything that we see is changing and will soon be gone, and we should bear in mind how many things have already changed over time, like the waters of streams flowing ceaselessly past—an idea that we can call the contemplation of impermanence.
2. External things cannot touch the soul, but our disturbances all arise from within. Marcus means that things don’t upset us, but our value judgments about them do. However, we can regain our composure by separating our values from external events using the strategy we’ve called cognitive distancing.

The universe is change: life is opinion.

This is what Marcus meant by “life is opinion”: that the quality of our life is determined by our value judgments, because those shape our emotions.

anger is a form of desire: “a desire for revenge on one who seems to have done an injustice inappropriately,” according to Diogenes Laertius.