Marcus Aurelius Had Some Good Ideas. He Also Didn’t Have an iPhone.

Marcus Aurelius is fucking everywhere.

Instagram.

YouTube.

Podcasts.

T-shirts.

Coffee mugs.

Usually there’s a picture of a marble statue staring thoughtfully into the distance while somebody tells you to wake up at 4:30 in the morning, take a cold shower, stop complaining, make more money, and become impossible to hurt.

Apparently the Roman emperor was also a productivity coach.

Who knew?

The funny thing is, I actually like Marcus Aurelius.

A lot.

There’s something incredibly useful about the basic Stoic idea that some things are within our control and other things simply aren’t.

Other people’s actions?

Not mine.

What somebody thinks about me?

Not mine.

The past?

Definitely not mine.

What I do next?

That one belongs to me.

It sounds incredibly simple.

Until you actually try to fucking do it.

I can sit on my couch and read Meditations and think:

Absolutely, Marcus.

I understand.

Other people’s behavior is outside my control.

I should concern myself with my own actions, my own judgments, my own character.

Beautiful.

Then somebody does something that pisses me off and suddenly I’m conducting a three-hour imaginary trial in my head where I’m the prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, jury, and occasionally a surprise witness.

Marcus would probably not approve.

Or maybe he would understand better than we think.

Because Meditations wasn’t written as a book for us.

Marcus was writing reminders to himself.

Over and over again.

Be patient.

Control your temper.

Stop worrying about what other people are doing.

Remember what matters.

Accept what you cannot control.

Why would a man who had mastered all of that need to keep reminding himself?

Probably because he hadn’t.

He was practicing.

That makes him considerably more interesting to me.

There’s another problem Marcus didn’t have.

He didn’t have an iPhone.

Imagine trying to practice Stoicism with one of these fucking things in your pocket.

Marcus had people who annoyed him.

We have people who annoy us and their Instagram stories.

Marcus could walk away from an argument.

We can walk away from an argument, sit on the couch, open our phones and see whether the person who pissed us off is currently drinking a margarita somewhere.

Marcus didn’t have read receipts.

He didn’t have typing bubbles.

He didn’t have somebody watching his story but not answering his text.

He didn’t have a little glowing rectangle capable of informing him, twenty-four hours a day, what everybody he knew was doing, thinking, eating, buying, arguing about, celebrating, or pretending to celebrate.

Marcus had rumination.

We have rumination with Wi-Fi.

That matters.

Not because the phone controls us.

That’s too easy.

My iPhone has never climbed onto the couch, grabbed me by the throat and demanded that I open Instagram.

I picked it up.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

The technology is designed to get my attention.

But it’s still my attention.

And somewhere in that distinction is probably one of the most useful applications of Stoicism to modern life.

I can’t control what somebody posts.

I can control whether I look at it.

I can’t control whether somebody responds to me.

I can control whether I check my phone fourteen times waiting for them to do it.

I can’t control what strangers on the internet think.

I can control whether I spend forty-five minutes arguing with one of them about something neither of us will remember next Tuesday.

At least theoretically.

I’m still working on that shit.

I think that’s why Stoicism keeps coming back.

There is something appealing about the idea of being less controlled by everything happening around us.

Especially now.

News.

Notifications.

Politics.

Work.

Texts.

Emails.

Social media.

Algorithms.

Other people’s opinions.

Other people’s lives.

Other people’s opinions about other people’s lives.

There’s an endless supply of shit competing for a piece of your brain.

The Stoics basically ask:

Which part of this actually belongs to you?

That’s a damn good question.

But somewhere along the way, parts of the internet turned Stoicism into something else.

Something closer to:

Wake up at 4:30.

Cold plunge.

Work out.

Journal.

Make money.

Don’t complain.

Don’t chase women.

Don’t show weakness.

Don’t need anybody.

Ignore your emotions.

Become a fucking machine.

I don’t remember Marcus writing that part.

To be fair, that’s not modern Stoicism as a whole.

There are plenty of thoughtful people trying to apply Stoic philosophy to modern life without turning it into some weird combination of hustle culture and emotional constipation.

But the internet loves extremes.

Nuance doesn’t look nearly as good over footage of somebody doing deadlifts in a dark gym.

Classical Stoicism wasn’t primarily about becoming rich, dominant, productive, or emotionally bulletproof.

It was about virtue.

Wisdom.

Justice.

Courage.

Temperance.

Character.

Those aren’t particularly sexy words anymore.

You can’t really sell a supplement with temperance.

The emotional part interests me the most.

Because sometimes Stoicism gets interpreted as:

Don’t let anything bother you.

I’m not sure that’s the point.

There’s a difference between controlling your response and pretending you don’t have one.

There’s a difference between resilience and emotional numbness.

There’s a difference between accepting that you cannot control another person and convincing yourself you shouldn’t care what they do.

I care.

Sometimes more than I’d like to.

I’ve been hurt by things people have done.

I’ve been angry.

Jealous.

Confused.

Disappointed.

I’ve replayed conversations.

I’ve imagined different outcomes.

I’ve wanted explanations I wasn’t going to get.

I can read Marcus Aurelius until the spine falls off the fucking book.

Those feelings don’t magically disappear.

Maybe they’re not supposed to.

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop feeling.

Maybe it’s to create a little space between the feeling and what you do next.

That seems considerably harder.

And considerably more useful.

Take anger.

Someone does something that pisses me off.

The feeling arrives before Marcus Aurelius can climb out of the bookshelf and intervene.

Now what?

I can send the text.

Make the call.

Write the email.

Say the thing.

Do something specifically because I want the other person to feel a little bit of what I’m feeling.

I’ve done versions of that.

Most people probably have.

Or I can sit with it long enough to ask:

What exactly am I trying to accomplish here?

Not:

Am I allowed to be angry?

Of course I’m allowed to be angry.

The better question might be:

What am I going to do with it?

That’s where Stoicism becomes useful to me.

Not as a way of denying the emotion.

As a way of interrogating the response.

And I fail at that all the time.

That’s another thing I like about Marcus.

He seems to have failed at it too.

The man was emperor of Rome.

If anybody had an excuse to believe he had his shit together, it was probably him.

Yet there he was, privately reminding himself not to be irritated by people.

Again.

And again.

And again.

There’s something reassuring about that.

Not because Marcus was secretly a mess.

I have no fucking idea.

But because philosophy wasn’t a finish line for him.

It was practice.

Maybe that’s what we’ve screwed up.

We read something insightful and immediately want to become the person who has mastered it.

I read about attachment and suddenly I’m analyzing attachment.

I read about vulnerability and suddenly I’m evaluating vulnerability.

I read Marcus and suddenly I’m supposed to be calmly accepting the universe while somebody is actively pissing me off.

Maybe knowing the idea isn’t the same as living it.

Actually, I’m pretty sure it isn’t.

There’s also something wonderfully ironic about consuming Stoicism through a smartphone.

A philosophy that repeatedly emphasizes attention, judgment and self-control…

delivered through a device specifically engineered to interrupt your attention.

Marcus might have hated the iPhone.

Or loved it.

Maybe he’d have had the entire Meditations manuscript in Notes.

Maybe he’d have been posting sunset pictures with:

You have power over your mind—not outside events.

Then checking every seven minutes to see how many likes it got.

Human nature hasn’t changed that much.

Maybe modern life doesn’t make Stoicism obsolete.

Maybe it makes it more relevant.

We have more information.

More stimulation.

More access to other people’s lives.

More opportunities to compare ourselves.

More opportunities to react instantly.

More opportunities to be outraged.

More opportunities to say something we regret before we’ve had thirty seconds to think about it.

Which means we also have thousands of tiny opportunities to practice the thing Marcus kept reminding himself to do.

Pay attention.

Question the judgment.

Control the response.

Let go of what isn’t yours.

Not perfectly.

Just a little better than yesterday.

And maybe that’s where I disagree with the version of Stoicism that sometimes floats around online.

I don’t want to become somebody who doesn’t give a shit.

That doesn’t sound enlightened.

It sounds lonely.

I want to give a shit about people.

I want relationships that matter enough that losing them would hurt.

I want things in my life that would actually bother me if they disappeared.

I want to care.

The question isn’t whether to care.

It’s how to care without letting everything you care about control you.

That’s a much harder problem.

Marcus doesn’t completely solve it for me.

Neither does therapy.

Neither does psychology.

Neither does a podcast.

Neither does a fucking Instagram quote.

Maybe nobody does.

But they can give us better questions.

And sometimes that’s enough.

So I’ll keep reading Marcus.

I’ll keep underlining things.

I’ll keep agreeing with him.

I’ll keep failing to do some of the things I just agreed with.

And occasionally I’ll remember something he wrote at exactly the moment I need it.

Maybe I’ll put the phone down.

Maybe I’ll wait before sending the text.

Maybe I’ll realize the thing I’m obsessing over doesn’t actually belong to me.

And maybe five minutes later I’ll pick the fucking phone back up again.

Progress.

Not enlightenment.

I’ll take it.

Would Marcus Aurelius have handled modern life better than the rest of us?

Maybe.

Or maybe after three weeks with an iPhone he’d have thrown the fucking thing into the Tiber.

I don’t know.

— Just James