Alex's Reviews > Meditations

As another reviewer astutely said, “Stoicism is a kind of play acting.” It is a way of asserting a false superiority over the things that make us human due to a deep discomfort about addressing them outright. This book, the diaries of a man desperately trying to convince himself* of its content, came off as aspirational more than realistic, and the thing about aspirations is they are comforting to people who want something to look up to, but conversely they bring a lot of shame to those same people who cannot measure up (and honestly, who, including Marcus, could measure up to the stringent standards of moral rightness and asceticism he established here?)

It was hard to see the real man behind the ideals. The expression “heavy is the head that wears the crown” came to mind. Psychologically, it read as a ginormous superego masking an ashamed id. I’m less interested in how someone might live their life if they have resolved the deep and dark things (and the idea that those things are ever fully resolved is a bit naive) than I am in how someone goes about grappling with them and then coming to some sort of measured conclusion. As it is, much of it reads as the identification of undesirable things (like anger) and desirable things (like…not being angry, or not acting angry). There’s a lot missing in between. Sort of like if a weight loss book said “eat less, move more, work out every day” without addressing challenges or psychological factors. What if we want things that are bad for us? Is it helpful to tell ourselves not to want them? For me, the answer is no, especially when the inevitability of death and smallness of our being would more logically lend itself to hedonism. As a mentor in the field of mental health once told me, “‘Should’ is one of the most damaging words in the English language.” Let us rather reckon with what IS, try to understand it, accept it, and set some realistic goals if we want to lead better lives.

With that said, just because I’m more interested in what he didn’t say than what he did say, that doesn’t mean I’m willing to completely disregard the value of his approach. The man appealed to our intuitive senses of what is good for us, and I appreciate the stoic perspective for the way it frees us from the obligation to participate blindly in the capitalist rat race and prioritization of pleasure and minimization of pain above all other things. There is certainly wisdom in trying not to be a slave to your desires and questioning the validity of those desires in the first place, and self-discipline does make for a better and easier life for most of us. Someone who internalizes Marcus’ maxims without suffering from a reflexive shame may well benefit from them. More power to those people—there are plenty of ways to be happy, and I don’t at all fault those who have found the blueprint to their own contentment in this book.

*this is not a criticism of Marcus but just goes to show that we are all fallible creatures, and oftentimes those of us who are the most dogmatic about how our lives should be led are the least acquainted with our true selves and desires, or otherwise the most ashamed