Marcus Aurelius‘ reign from 161 to 180 was defined by a pandemic (which originated in the distant east and quickly overwhelmed Rome’s institutions), civil unrest, interminable wars in the provinces, personal health issues, cultural decadence, income inequality, and so much else.

As he would observe in Meditations, people have always been people, and life has always been life. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Yet, Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics still found a way to be successful, happy, strong, productive, and good, despite all these difficulties. In this, we must learn from them. The history of Stoic philosophy is filled with all sorts of unique characters from unique backgrounds — from slaves to generals, lawyers to writers, daughters to doctors — who thrived amidst both adversity and prosperity. 

After more than a decade now about writing about the Stoics, most recently with my book Lives of the Stoics, here are seven lessons we can take from the ancient world and apply to our modern times.

1. Find a mentor

“Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you … For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.” — Seneca

Fittingly, the story of Stoicism begins with misfortune. On a merchant voyage, Zeno was shipwrecked. He lost everything. He washed up in Athens where he walked into a bookstore and listened to the bookseller reading dialogues from Socrates. After the reading, Zeno asked the question that would change his life: “Where can I find a man like that?” That is: Where can I find my own Socrates? Where can I find someone to study under?

In that moment, Crates, a well-known Athenian philosopher, happened to be passing by. The bookseller simply extended his hand and pointed. You could say it was fated. The Stoics of later years certainly would have. According to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, Zeno joked, “Now that I’ve suffered shipwreck, I’m on a good journey,” or according to another account, “You’ve done well, Fortune, driving me thus to philosophy,” he reportedly said. 

Nearly all of the ancient Stoics had a formative mentor, living or dead. Cleanthes had Zeno. Cato had Sarpedon. Seneca had Attalus. Epictetus had Musonius Rufus. Marcus Aurelius had Rusticus — who turned him onto Epictetus. Chrysippus had Cleanthes. Thrasea had Cato. Antipater had Diogenes. Panaetius had Crates. Posidonius had Panaetius.

The Stoics knew that life is hard and requires help. “Only beasts can do it alone,” Marcus said. We need guidance from those who are further ahead on the path. We need mentors. 

2. We don’t control what happened, we control how we respond

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own … ” —Epictetus

Epictetus’ most powerful insight as a teacher derives directly from his experiences as a slave. Although all humans are introduced, at some point, to the laws of the universe, almost from the moment he was born, Epictetus was reminded daily how little control he had, even of his own person. He adopted this lesson into what he described as our “chief task in life” — distinguishing between what is up to us and what is not up to us (in his language, ta eph hemin, ta ouk eph hemin).

Once we have organized our understanding of the world into this black and white bucket, what remains — what was so central to Epictetus’s survival as a slave — is to focus on what is up to us. Our attitudes. Our emotions. Our wants. Our desires. Our opinions about what happened to us. Those choices are up to us.

“You can bind up my leg,” Epictetus would say — indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken — “but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.” 

That is your “most efficacious gift,” Epictetus said — the power to always control how you respond. That’s the ingredient of freedom, whatever one’s condition.

3. Be different

“It never ceases to amaze me: We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” — Marcus Aurelius

If you want to improve, Epictetus said, if you want to achieve wisdom, you have to be okay with looking strange or even clueless from time to time. 

Epictetus tells us the story of the Stoic Agrippinus, who said we are all threads in a garment — most people were indistinguishable from each other, one thread among countless others. Most people were happy conforming, being anonymous, handling their own tiny, unsung role in the fabric. In a Roman Empire that had given itself over fully to avarice and corruption, the best strategy would have been to keep a low profile, to blend in so one does not catch the attention of the capricious and cruel ruler who holds the power of life and death.

But to Agrippinus, this kind of compromise was inconceivable. Despite what everyone else was doing, Agrippinus refused to keep a low profile during Nero’s reign, refused to conform or tamp down his independent thinking. Why do this, Agrippinus was asked, why not be like the rest of us?

“I want to be the red,” he said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful ….  ‘Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?” Years later there would be a song by Alice in Chains, which would say in a nutshell what Agrippinus believed in his heart: “If I can’t be my own, I’d feel better dead.”

Beautifully said. And a reminder to all of us today. Embrace who you really are, embrace what makes you unique. Be red. Be the small part that makes the rest bright.

We desperately need you to do that. 

4. Value virtue

“Be wise and self-controlled, and share in courage and justice … the art by which a human would become good. We must do just that!” —Musonius Rufus

Courage.

Justice.

Temperance. 

Wisdom. 

They are the most essential values in Stoicism. “If, at some point in your life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage — it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.” That was almost twenty centuries ago. We have discovered a lot of things since then — automobiles, the Internet, cures for diseases that were previously a death sentence — but have we found anything better?

… than being brave

… than doing what’s right

… than moderation and sobriety

… than truth and understanding?

No, we have not. It’s unlikely we ever will. 

So memorize those four virtues. Keep them close to your heart and hand always. Act on them. Live them. Tell everyone you meet about them. 

5. If you can’t do good, at least do not harm 

“To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice — it degrades you.” —Marcus Aurelius

Shakespeare, the great observer of the Stoics, said that the good we do in life is easily forgotten, but the evil we do lives on and on. No Stoic philosopher illustrates this principle more than Diotimus.

Sometime around the turn of the first century BC, he committed what can only be described as an unjustifiable crime. He forged dozens and dozens of letters that framed the rival philosopher Epicurus as a sinful glutton and depraved maniac. It was an act of despicable philosophical slander, and Diotimus was quickly brought up on charges.

For a school that prized logic and truth as much as virtuous behavior, Diotimus’s actions were inexcusable. Seneca, who writes about all sorts of philosophers (including the Epicureans some eighty times across his surviving works), never once mentions the incident. It would be, then, Diotimus’s sole contribution to the history of Stoicism.

Musonius Rufus best captured the prevailing lesson when he said, “If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the same endures.” 

6. Compromise is key

“No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.” — Marcus Aurelius

Cato, one of the most vaunted and towering Stoics, built a reputation and a career out of his refusal to give an inch in the face of pressure. He refused political compromise in every form, to the point that those who did turned his name into an aphorism: “What do you expect of us? We can’t all be Catos.”

But Cato’s inflexibility did not always best serve the public good. When Pompey — one of Rome’s greatest generals and political forces — returned to Rome from his foriegn conquests, he felt out potential alliances with Cato. The two had tangled in the past. So when Pompey proposed a marriage alliance either with Cato’s niece or daughter, Cato dismissed it and dismissed it rudely.

“Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, that “Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.” 

As Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni write in “Rome’s Last Citizen,” this “was an unmatched, unmissable opportunity.” In so rejecting the alliance, Cato drove the powerful Pompey into an alliance with Caesar instead, who promptly married his daughter Julia to Pompey. United and unstoppable, the two men would soon overturn centuries of constitutional precedent.

For Cato, to compromise — to play politics with the bedrock laws of his nation at stake — would have been moral capitulation. But this all-or-nothing strategy ended in crushing defeat. Indeed, no one did more than Cato to rage against his Republic’s fall, but few did more, to bring that fall to pass.

7. Memento Mori

“Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind … No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.” —Seneca

Born with a chronic illness that loomed large throughout his life, Seneca was constantly thinking about and writing about the final act of life. “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life,” he said. “Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” 

Most interestingly, he quibbled with the idea that death was something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future. “This is our big mistake,” Seneca wrote, “to think we look forward to death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.” That was Seneca’s great insight — that we are dying every day and no day, once dead, can be revived. 

So we should listen to the command that Marcus gave himself. “Concentrate every minute like a Roman,” he wrote, “On doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.” The key to this kind of concentration? “Do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life.”

That’s the power of Memento Mori — of meditating on your mortality. It isn’t about being morbid or making you scared. It’s about giving you power. It’s to inspire, to motivate, to clarify, to concentrate like a Roman on the thing in front of you. Because it may well be the last thing you do in your life. 

The Stoics were philosophers, but more than that they were doers. They didn’t have room for big words or big ideas, just stuff that made you better right here, right now.  As Marcus Aurelius said:

“Justice, honesty, self-control, courage … don’t make room for anything but it — for anything that might lead you astray, tempt you off the road, and leave you unable to devote yourself completely to achieving the goodness that is uniquely yours.”

When I first moved to New York, I had dinner with a friend who had lived there a long time. The thing about the city, he told me, is that everything is so expensive, it’s almost freeing. His apartment rented for half of what I would later buy an entire farm for. He was in the middle of planning a wedding in the city, too. In any sane environment, he said, you’d look for a deal; you’d refuse to be gouged or charged exorbitant prices for ordinary things. 

But in New York? You just have to accept it. 

It costs what it costs. That’s it. 

Now, I personally came to believe that almost none of the advantages offered by the city were worth the price—and still don’t, which is why I moved—but this lesson has stuck with me. Because it transcends both geography and finances. 

Reality is indifferent to our preferences. There is no such thing as a fair price. Stuff—life—costs what it costs. You either pay it or you don’t. 

The Stoics had a beautiful phrase for this. They called it the art of acquiescence. 

It would be better if I never had to run into traffic on the way to my office. It would be better if a good chunk of our fellow humans hadn’t hardened their hearts to suffering. It’d be better if I didn’t have to tell my kids that they can’t go to school or see their friends right now. It’d be better if ordinary prices were always attached to ordinary things.

But that’s not how it goes. So if I want to keep living here, in Austin, on Planet Earth, I’ve got to accept it. I have to pay it. 

That’s an idea I’ve loved from Seneca. He points out that taxes are not just levied on income.  They are just the financial form. There are many forms of taxes in life. You can argue with them, you can go to great—but ultimately futile—lengths to evade them, or you can simply pay them and enjoy the fruits of what you get to keep.

“Nothing will ever befall me that I will receive with gloom or a bad disposition,” he writes. “I will pay my taxes gladly. Now, all the things which cause complaint or dread are like the taxes of life—things from which, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope for exemption or seek escape.”

I’ve posted this quote on Instagram on April 15th the last few years and it’s been hilarious to see how angry some get. As if people haven’t been complaining about their taxes for thousands of years! And by the way, where are those people from so long ago? Dead. 

Everything we do has a toll attached to it. Waiting around is a tax on traveling. Rumors and gossip are the taxes that come from acquiring a public persona. Disagreements and occasional frustration are taxes placed on even the happiest of relationships. Theft is a tax on abundance and having things that other people want. Stress and problems are tariffs that come attached to success.

And on and on and on.

This can make you angry, or you can come to terms with it. 

Especially since, like with income, taxes are a good problem to have. Far better than, say, making so little there is nothing left to pay the government or living in anarchy and having to pay for every basic service in a struggle against nature. Remember: There is a certain way to get out of paying taxes—literal or figurative… it’s called death (and actually, because of the estate tax, that’s not true either). 

When the broadcaster Stuart Scott found out he had cancer, possibly fatal cancer, he had this reaction. It wasn’t resignation, it was responsibility. He was an adult about it, a real man—or perhaps almost more than the kind of man that most of us are capable of being. In any case, he was not like these children who get upset the first time something doesn’t go their way. 

When a friend asked if he ever thought, “Why me?” he said, “I have two girls that I love. I have a wonderful job that I love getting up for every day. Why not me? I’m about due.” When another friend said they wished they could take some of his cancer and suffer instead of him, he said, “I wouldn’t let you do it. I got it.”

When you meet someone who has true zen about them, you can bet they are operating on that level. 

They are calm because they have learned what they have to accept. They are happy because they’ve stopped fighting battles they were never going to win. They are grateful for what they get to keep, not what was taken or what they’ve had to put up with. 

Now more than ever we need this attitude, as difficult as it is. 

A pandemic is a pandemic. Does it cost wearing a mask? OK. Does it cost traveling less? OK. Does it cost enduring fools and jerks who can’t understand these things? OK, I’ll come to terms with that too. 

Because what am I going to do? Wear myself down fighting something that can’t be fought? Become crazy myself? Fall prey to magical thinking or conspiracy theories?

No. Like Seneca, I’ll pay my taxes gladly. 

So should you. 

My latest book Lives of the Stoics is available for preorder now—and there’s all sorts of bonus chapters and extra material that you’ll only get if you preorder it right now. Preorder your copy today and receive:

• An audio interview between the two authors of Lives of the Stoics, Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

• Three bonus chapters on some of the most Stoic figures in modern US history, James Mattis, James Stockdale, and Arianna Huffington

• Preorder five or more copies and receive a free Marcus Aurelius “Waste No More Time Arguing What A Good Man Should Be. Be One.” print from the Daily Stoic Store (shipping not included) 

Click here to preorder your copy now.

You can preorder signed copies of my new book Lives of the Stoics here.

This is not a political argument.

But it says something about our politics right now that the right in America is convinced that Joe Biden is a radical leftist, while the progressive left holds up their collective nose at his unacceptable reputation as an establishment Democrat, which is to say, a “moderate.”

As if moderation hasn’t been considered a key virtue for thousands of years!

Just look at Aristotle’s Golden Mean. Most virtues, the philosopher explained, exist as a midpoint between two vices. Courage, for example, exists in the middle of recklessness on the one end and cowardice on the other. Love sits between obsession and apathy. Justice, between authoritarianism and anarchy.

Instead of understanding and admiring moderation, we’ve come to see it as a kind of weakness wherever it shows up in the culture. The reaction to the retirement of Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck at the beginning of last year’s NFL season is just one of many recent illustrations. Despite four appearances in the Pro Bowl, three trips to the playoffs, two AFC South titles and nearly $100 million in career earnings, Luck was derided by many sportswriters for choosing not to continue to play through the pain, or grind himself down for the game. How dare he have enough, they said. How dare he leave $450 million on the table. He should be driven to win at all costs. Leave it all out there on the field… including his future. Why not? He should have no interests worth pursuing outside football, anyway!

In politics, we have similarly deranged priorities. We’re not looking for competency, we’re not looking for experience, we’re not looking for somebody who can effectively compromise and collaborate with others to actually pass legislation or lead diverse interests, locally or nationally. No. We want stridency! Purity! We either want someone who will burn it all down or someone who will build it back up, but only if it’s to our exacting, ambitious specifications, no exceptions. A destroyer of worlds or a builder of fantasy—nothing in between. 

Moderation? Someone who understands there is merit in the grievances from both sides of the political spectrum? That’s a vice. You’re either an unpatriotic cuck and a simp or a xenophobic white supremacist. If that sounds crazy, watch what happens anytime anybody says anything reasonable these days. They are immediately besieged by both sides. 

And let’s not even get started with pleasure or money or anything else like that. More is better. The person with the most is obviously the happiest and the best, right? Would there even be reality television without immoderate people? Or is pop and influencer culture almost entirely predicated on people who, with no sense of self-awareness, have given themselves over entirely to the pursuit of total pleasure, mega fame, multi-millions and absolute power?

We even get the word “Epicurean” wrong. In reality, Epicurus was a very moderate guy. There’s a letter he once sent to a patron who had offered him whatever he wanted. Epicurus could have requested money or exotic goods. Instead, he asked for a small pot of cheese. That’s it! That’s all the famous Epicurean wanted. We’re so depraved, we’ve come to use that word as a cover for our own excesses.

Epicurus made this specific request of his patron because he knew that simple, ordinary pleasures, enjoyed in moderation, were actually the most enjoyable. As he wrote in a letter: 

By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the mind. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not the satisfaction of lusts, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the motives of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul. Of all this the greatest good is prudence. For this reason prudence is a more precious thing even than the other virtues, for a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice; nor lead a life of prudence, honour, and justice, which is not also a life of pleasure. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them.

That idea of avoiding the hangover—of knowing the reasonable limits and prudently following them? This is just another way of thinking about moderation. Better that Andrew Luck walk away from football while he could still walk away, than to hang on for one hit too many and regret it for the rest of his painful life. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs talk condescendingly about people who sold their companies too early—as if $1B for Instagram wasn’t more money than a person could spend in a lifetime. The people who let it ride and lost everything? We seem to pretend those folks don’t exist. 

Moderation is not being a pussy. It’s being smart. It’s knowing what enough is. It’s getting out while the getting is good. Sure, it’s also about leaving a little on the table sometimes, even in the most critical moments, but there are far worse sins in this world. It mean even mean *gasp* being merciful to the other side when you win.

To bring this back to where I began—politics—but in a non-partisan way, I think this passage from David Brooks is worth reading, whatever party you belong to.

If you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. 

At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions. In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt. 

Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.

What Brooks is doing is making an argument for moderates—not Biden specifically, but moderates generally. Not strident purists or populists, but people who understand that both sides are likely to have good ideas and, more essentially, that you need buy-in from more than just your own side to create change. 

Moderation is not just splitting the difference. It’s not refusing to take a stand. It’s actually a pretty radical and difficult position to hold. Aristotle defined it as the hardest thing in the world to do—to find the right “feelings at the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right purpose and in the right manner, is to feel the best amount of them, which is the mean amount—and the best amount.” He says that since feelings and actions are the objects of greatness, “feelings and actions excess and deficiency are errors, while the mean amount is praised, and constitutes success.”

I’ll grant you that it’s more exciting, more inspiring to be idealistic… but only on paper. The real work—the tangible, sustainable work—is done by the people who are neither pessimistic or delusional. It’s done by the pragmatists, who know how to balance what could be done with what can be done. 

In fact, the entire American system is designed around moderation. Almost all the decisions of the founders were designed to make it really hard to rule from an extreme or minority position. The need for compromise and settling was a feature, not a bug of the system. It was to prevent lurching from one set of policies to the other. It was to reduce the changes of ideological swings made in the heat of a crisis, or in reaction to a trend.

There is even a supposed exchange between Washington and Jefferson over breakfast. Why do we pour our coffee from the cup to the saucer, Washington asked? (This was how coffee used to be consumed.) To cool it, Jefferson replied. The Senate, Washington replied, with its longer term lengths and smaller size, was designed for the same purpose. To cool legislation instead of being burned by political pressure that is more constant and severe in the House with its larger numbers, smaller constituencies and biennial elections. 

It’s not just about the noun—being “a moderate”—it’s about the verb, too. Moderating. 

I’m not saying any of this to necessarily endorse Joe Biden. I am just making a plea for that old but forgotten virtue in politics as well as in life. 

You don’t respond to a lurch in one direction by lurching the opposite way with equal force. The dangers of right-wing populism should not be answered with left-wing populism. Both are dumb and impossible to govern with. Just because everyone else is running their life to the extreme, just because other people are unhealthy, doesn’t mean you have to be, too.

Moderation is key. 

My new book Lives of the Stoics is of course in part about moderation–as that’s a key virtue of Stoicism—and I think a running theme through the lives of the 26 ancient Stoic philosophers I study in the book. I’m really excited about this one and can’t wait for you to read it. If you pre-order it now, there are a bunch of awesome free bonuses and of course it helps me out a great deal. B&N has a limited run of signed copies as well. It hits stores 9/29, but please do preorder it now!