Why Did Marcus Write His Meditations? | The Source of Your Anxiety

Why did Marcus Aurelius write his Meditations? It wasn’t for an audience. It wasn’t simply to practice his Greek or his rhetorical abilities—he was already good at all those things. The book lacks an author’s note and he never seemed to have told anyone about his intentions, so we can’t know for sure. But there are two clues that, when put together, provide an answer as good as any. Have you noticed how much of Meditations is about other people? The opening, “Debts and Lessons,” makes up nearly ten percent of the book. Almost every other page has at least one quote or one story or one mention of a story about somebody else.---And in todays Daily Stoic excerpt, Ryan discusses Epictesus's quote about where our anxiety comes from: "When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, 'What do they want?' For if a person wasn't wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety?"✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  Why did Marcus Aurelius write his Meditations? It wasn't for an audience. It wasn't simply to practice his Greek or his rhetorical abilities. He was already good at all these things. The book lacks an author's note, and he never seems to have told anyone about his intentions, so we can't know for sure. But there are two clues that, when put together, provide an answer as good as any. Have you ever noticed how much of Meditations is about other people? The opening detents and lessons make up nearly 10% of the book. Almost every other page has at least one quote, or one story, or one mention of a story about somebody else. So when we come across this passage in Meditations, it suddenly makes sense. Marcus writes,

• 1:15Ryan Holiday?

  "When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have. This one's energy, that one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when the virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we are practically showered with them. It's good to keep this in mind." Marcus was writing to encourage himself. He was thinking of the qualities of the people around him. He was showering himself in their virtues so that he might be improved by the association. And as far as we can tell, this worked, because he was a good man, despite facing incredible temptations and pressures. Today, we should follow this example,

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  maybe in a journal, maybe just by taking a few minutes to stop and think. What are the qualities in the people around us that we admire? What makes the greats of history special? What virtues do our friends or family embody that we can take note of and emulate? How can their example show us how to do and be better? It's the easiest and most effective form of encouragement there is, and we can access it anytime we like.

• 2:34Ryan Holiday?

  The Source of Your Anxiety.

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn't wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety? That's Epictetus's Discourses 2:13. The anxious father worried about his children, what does he want? A world that is always safe. A frenzied traveler, what does she want? For the weather to hold and for the traffic to part so she can make her flight. A nervous investor that the market will turn around and the investment will pay off. All of these scenarios hold the same thing in common. As Epictetus says, it's wanting something outside your control. Getting worked up, getting excited, nervously pacing, these intense, pained, anxious moments

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  show us at our most futile and servile. Staring at the clock, at the ticker, at the next checkout lane over, it's as if we all belong to a religious cult that believes the gods of fate will only give us what we want if we sacrifice our peace of mind. Today, when you find yourself getting anxious, ask yourself, why are my insides twisted into knots? Am I in control here, or is it my anxiety? And most importantly, is my anxiety doing me any good? I don't know about you, but the pandemic certainly brought that home, right? Like, the immensity of our powerlessness over the situation. Yeah, get your vaccine. Yeah, wear a mask, be safe, whatever.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  You control some tiny things, but you don't control what's happening on the other side of the planet. You don't control what your local government is doing, what your federal government is doing, countries coming together. You don't control any of it. And we've just watched, time after time, as they've messed up, fallen short, and those consequences came back to us. And there's this great term that's come out of the pandemic, I mean, I'm sure it existed before, the idea of doom scrolling, right? You pull up your phone, you're anxious, you don't like where the world's going, and you just, mainline crappy news. And it's just, it's a way of feeding that anxiety, of course. But it's not, of course, it's also not doing anything about the situation.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  I talked about this on Rich Roll's podcast when I was there to talk about Courage is Calling. I was explaining that, you know, one of the things the pandemic did by taking things, so many things away, right? Like I traveled less, had less meetings, I had less going on, especially early on in the pandemic, less so now as we've sort of adjusted. But early, early on, it was like, all the things that I used to think I would get anxious about, like flying, as I'm talking about the anxious father, the frenzied traveler, the nervous investor. That was me, just a, just a little inside baseball, of course. I'm always writing about myself. But as those things went away, I noticed the anxiety was still there. Like, I didn't have anywhere to go, there's nothing to do, we're just supposed to sit around,

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  like, you know, and, and I still felt this anxiety. Because the anxiety was never about the thing. The anxiety is within me, it's within all of us. There was a great, I don't know if you follow Tank Sinatra, but he's like one of the sort of biggest meme accounts on Instagram, he's hilarious. We posted one of his messages on Daily Dad, which you should follow if you're not, but it's this fictional conversation with his son, and he said, "Do you understand why daddy worries about you?" He's saying to his son, and his son says, "Because you're a generally nervous person?" "Yes, exactly, right? The anxiety," the Stoic said, "it's not from the outside situation, it's from us. We're the source of the anxiety." Yeah, sure, it's better to miss the flight than not make the flight.

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  But like, feeling crappy about it for that 45 frantic minutes, it's not making you go any faster. You're sitting in the cab, you're just, "Oh my God, is this gonna happen? Is this gonna happen?" That's not making the car move faster, that's not making the traffic get out of your way. A friend of mine has this sort of doomsday scenario that this, this negative news article is coming out about, about him and, and his company. Think largely undeserved. And I actually think a lot of his catastrophizing about it is exaggerated. But the point is, it's going to come sometime in the next month or so. It might even be out by the time you're listening to this, but he is sort of handing himself over to torturing himself about it every day until that happens.

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  He's just a nervous wreck about it. I feel terrible for him. I've tried to to sort of pull him out of it. But he's kind of just given himself over to that anxiety and it's he's, as Seneca would say, suffering before his time. He's suffering more than necessary, but that's really what that anxiety is. It's this like ritual, this pattern, this, I don't know, dance we do that we hope is going to alleviate the thing we don't want to happen or the thing we do want to happen, or the bullet we hope to dodge, or whatever it is. But it's really just torturing ourselves, torturing ourselves in advance. It really has nothing to do with the thing at all. Right? It's because, as as Tank was saying, we're just generally nervous people. Or as Marcus was saying, because the anxiety is within us, it's who we are.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  So I think today's message is just a reminder about anxiety. The source of the anxiety is not the external situations. It's not the other person's fault. Nobody's making you anxious. You're the source of your anxiety and at the root of your anxiety is a focus on an outcome that will happen or it won't. Right? That your actions will work or they'll won't. But the torturing, the hand wringing, the stress, the nervous phone calls, the frantically checking your phone over and over and over and over and over again. The not being able to concentrate, the lashing out, whatever the symptoms, however they manifest for you. That's not going to address it.

• 8:25Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm, I'm, I'm not saying this glibly. I'm saying this again, as someone who who knows where you're coming from, who experiences that anxiety myself. It sucks. It's no fun. And the irony is some of the things that I find myself most anxious about. I end up bringing about through my anxiety. I really want something to go well, like, I don't know, like a family trip or, you know, a date with my wife or something. I want it to go well. And then because of the anxiety, because of the stress, the pressure, the expectations. Right? You know how this goes, not the way you want it to go. So just a reminder where the source of your anxiety is. Work on it. It's not making you happier. It's not making the world better.

• 9:10Ryan Holiday?

  Let's discard it, as Marcus says.

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  The