Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Filed under the name Marcus · June 2, 2026
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor who apparently spent his downtime writing private notes to himself about how to be a better, calmer, more disciplined person, which is very funny to me because that's basically what half of self-help TikTok is doing now, just with worse lighting and no empire attached. His notes got collected later as Meditations and somehow became one of the most quoted philosophy books two thousand years later, still getting recycled into inspirational quote graphics by people who've never read a page of it, myself occasionally included before I actually looked into him for this. Underneath the meme-ification though, there's something genuinely steadying in there about not needing the world to go your way in order to hold yourself together, which, as someone stitching together school and three different jobs at once, I actually needed to sit with for a second instead of scrolling past. It's strange that advice from a Roman emperor two millennia ago about staying calm under pressure still basically works. I guess some problems just don't go out of style.