If Money Could Talk, What Would It Say?

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations not for posterity but for himself—a private journal of self-accountability, written by the most powerful man in the ancient world. Two thousand years later, those same pages have become one of the most enduring works of philosophy. The gap between his inner life and his outer responsibilities is precisely what makes the Stoic tradition so relevant today.

What the Stoics Would Notice About Us

If Marcus Aurelius or any of the ancient Stoics could return to the present, they would likely be "both amazed and appalled" by the sheer volume of information coming at us. The most powerful man in an empire of millions of square miles and twenty to thirty million human beings already struggled to keep track of everything. He would look at what arrives through our phones and wonder how we ever find time for reflection, contemplation, or long-term planning.

The reason Meditations has endured for nearly twenty centuries, the argument goes, is precisely because that busy, powerful person was taking time at morning and night to converse with himself—to put himself up for review. The Stoics would wonder why we do not do enough of that.