Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.38

It is not right to vex ourselves at things,

For they care nothing about it.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7 (tr Long)

The Philosopher-Emperor here quotes the great playwright Euripides, with one the most simple and most helpful pieces of advice I have ever heard.

I think of all of the wasted time, all of the wasted effort, spent in being frustrated by my circumstances, by the people I was convinced had wronged me, by the way the world worked in ways I did not want it to work.

And here was the thing: my annoyance only disturbed me. I only made myself worse. People who have acted poorly never cared for me to begin with, and they certainly don’t care for me after the fact. I’m just disposable to them. The events of life, however painful or crushing, do not change when I fret about them. It will be as it will be, but who I am is entirely up to me.

In one of the darkest moments of my Wilderness Years, when I allowed the Black Dog to tell me what to do, I once sat down with a fifth of bourbon and a pack of cigarettes. It was nothing but an exercise in self-pity. One of the few friends I had left sat down right next to me.

“Go ahead, drink yourself stupid. It won’t make it any better. It isn’t about what’s happened, it’s about you pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Let that girl break your heart, and let the bullies have their way. You sit there crying, all worried about them, but they have absolutely no worry about you. You are already forgotten to them.”

As painful as it felt to hear that, it was completely true. So there I sat, wondering about what others may think of me. There I sat, angered by the way of the world. Yet what others may have thought, or how circumstances played themselves out, had nothing to do with me.

That girl who broke my heart has absolutely no concern for me. I was just a footnote in her life. That thoughtless boss who wouldn’t give me a raise doesn’t even remember my name. I was just another commodity for his own success.

Nothing I can ever do will change them. All that happily remains is for me to change myself.

Some say that we have to go out and make the world fit us, and to make others conform to our own wants and desires. They are sorely mistaken. At best, we may find a convenient holding pattern, where the situation of life happens to be preferable or advantageous for that moment. The real challenge, the only one that yields anything reliable, is mastering our own thinking.

A fool is angry because of what has been done to him, while a wise man is happy about what he can do. 

Written in 3/1999