Three issues in, we’ve covered your attention, your gut, and your ability to spot manipulation. This week we step back even further — into history, into philosophy, and into a set of ideas that have survived 2,000 years because they keep being true. This is the issue I most wanted to write.
There is a book that has never been out of print.
It was written by a man who never intended it to be published. He wrote it in fragments, over years, in military camps on the frozen banks of the Danube and in the intervals between imperial audiences in Rome. He wrote it in Greek, which was not his native language, perhaps because the distance helped. He wrote it to himself.
The man was Marcus Aurelius — Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, commander of the largest army on earth, ruler of 70 million people across 5 million square kilometres. The book is the Meditations.
And it reads, in places, like the private journal of someone in the middle of an anxiety spiral.
“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.” He wrote that not as confident wisdom dispensed from a throne — he wrote it as a reminder to himself, on a day when the outside events were very much getting to him.
This is the thing most people miss about Stoicism. It was not invented by people who had it figured out. It was invented by people who were struggling — and who built a philosophy to help them struggle better.
Marcus Aurelius — the philosopher king who ruled the Roman Empire while privately wrestling with self-doubt, grief, and exhaustion.
He inherited an empire already in crisis. During his reign, Rome faced simultaneous catastrophes on almost every front: the Antonine Plague (an epidemic that killed five million people), wars on the northern and eastern borders, internal revolts, and a succession of personal losses — Marcus buried several of his children during his lifetime.
He was also, by his own account in the Meditations, slow to wake in the mornings, prone to irritability, and deeply uncertain whether he was doing enough good in the world. He worried about becoming corrupted by power. He worried about his temper. He found people exhausting and had to remind himself repeatedly that they were not trying to be difficult — they were simply operating from the limits of their own understanding.
He was, in other words, recognisably human.
And in the margins of a life of extraordinary external pressure, he developed a set of mental practices that modern neuroscience is only now beginning to understand.
This is the foundational idea of Stoic philosophy, stated most clearly by the former slave and Stoic teacher Epictetus, who was one of Marcus’s primary influences:
“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
The practice is deceptively simple: before any situation that causes you distress, draw a line. On one side, everything you can directly control — your response, your effort, your attention, your values. On the other, everything you cannot — other people’s opinions, outcomes, the past, the weather, the economy, what happens after you die.
Stoics do not say the second category doesn’t matter. They say that directing your energy toward it is structurally irrational — it cannot change the outcome and it costs you the energy you need for the first category.
The Stoic practice of journaling — examining what is in your control — is one of the most evidence-backed tools for anxiety management modern psychology has found.
What neuroscience now confirms: Psychologists call this the distinction between “primary control” and “secondary control” coping strategies. A 2019 meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin found that acceptance-based strategies — focusing on your response rather than trying to control the uncontrollable — were among the most effective interventions for chronic anxiety and stress. The Stoics got there two thousand years earlier.
The anxious mind tends to do the opposite: it focuses almost exclusively on the uncontrollable. It replays conversations it cannot undo, worries about events that haven’t happened, and rehearses catastrophes over which it has no power. The dichotomy of control is not a passive acceptance of suffering — it is a precision instrument for redirecting the mind toward where its energy actually produces something.
Marcus wrote: “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
This one sounds counterintuitive, even dark. But stay with it.
Stoics practised what they called premeditatio malorum — the premeditation of evils. In plain language: deliberately imagining the loss of things you love, so that you appreciate them more fully while you have them, and fear their loss less when they go.
Marcus wrote about imagining the death of people he loved — not to dwell in morbidity, but to dissolve the illusion of permanence that causes so much quiet anxiety. We suffer twice with the things we love: once in the fearing of their loss, and once in the losing. Negative visualisation, practised gently, addresses the first suffering.
What neuroscience now confirms: Modern research on a related practice — “mental contrasting,” developed by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen at NYU — shows that people who regularly consider obstacles and negative outcomes alongside positive goals show significantly better goal achievement, greater emotional resilience, and lower anxiety than those who practise purely positive visualisation. The positive-thinking industry has it partly backwards.
There is also a hedonic adaptation dimension here: we are wired to stop noticing what we have. The house, the relationship, the health, the person — they become background. Negative visualisation is the practice of making them foreground again, before life does it for you without your consent.
Try this tonight: before you sleep, spend two minutes imagining your life without one thing you take for granted. Not in a spiralling, anxious way — with the calm curiosity of someone appreciating what they have while they have it.
The Stoics kept death close — not as a morbid obsession, but as a clarifying lens on how to spend a finite life.
The phrase memento mori — “remember that you will die” — was a practice, not merely a phrase. Roman generals returning from triumph would have a slave ride beside them in the chariot, whispering in their ear: “Remember, you are mortal.” Even in the highest moment of external achievement, the reminder of finitude.
Marcus returned to this theme constantly in the Meditations: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
This sounds grim. In practice, it is the opposite.
When you hold the fact of your mortality lightly but consistently — not as a source of terror but as a clarifying lens — trivial concerns fall away with remarkable speed. The argument about something unimportant, the anxiety about what someone thinks of you, the procrastination on the thing you actually care about — they shrink when measured against the limited number of days you actually have.
What neuroscience now confirms: Terror Management Theory, developed by psychologist Jeff Greenberg and colleagues, has produced over 500 studies showing that death awareness, when integrated rather than suppressed, consistently increases people’s connection to their values, their relationships, and their sense of purpose. The research shows that the societies and individuals most anxious about death are often the ones most desperately suppressing awareness of it — not the ones who have made peace with it.
The Stoics were not death-obsessed. They were life-clarifying.
Here is what I find most moving about Marcus Aurelius.
He was, by any measure, the most powerful person on earth during his lifetime. He had every material comfort available in the ancient world. He had armies, palaces, philosophers, the resources of an empire.
And he spent the last decade of his life in military tents on the frozen northern frontier of that empire, writing notes to himself about how to be a better person.
Not a better emperor. A better person.
He never seemed to feel he had arrived. He never seemed to believe the philosophy had made him immune to struggle. The Meditations are full of self-correction — moments where you can almost see him catching himself in old patterns, gently returning to the practices.
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
There is something profoundly human about that. The person with everything, writing in the cold, asking himself the same questions you ask yourself.
The questions did not make him less human. They made him more.
The Stoic practice was never purely theoretical. It was a daily, repeated turning of attention toward what matters. Here are three questions in that spirit — not to answer once and file away, but to return to:
1. What am I trying to control right now that I cannot actually control? Not to shame yourself for caring about it. Just to see it clearly.
2. What would I do differently today if I knew my time was more limited than I assume? Not a morbid question. A clarifying one.
3. What do I have right now that I am too familiar with to fully appreciate? Hold it in your mind for thirty seconds. That is the whole practice.
A poem to close.
The Emperor’s Notes
He ruled seventy million people and still, in the cold of the camp, had to remind himself not to snap at the servant who brought cold soup.
He wrote it down. Not for us — for himself. A man trying, imperfectly, in the margins of power.
Twenty centuries later you find his notes and recognise the morning — the same reluctance to rise, the same crowded mind, the same small failures you’d hoped, by now, to have outgrown.
Philosophy is not what the wise say from a distance.
It is what the struggling write to themselves in the dark,
hoping that by morning something will have shifted.
Something always does.
Thank you for reading. If this issue moved something in you, share it. These ideas deserve more readers than they have.
Next issue: The loneliness epidemic — why we’re more connected and more alone than ever.
Stay curious.
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