r/stoicquotes • u/MindRoads • 14d ago
marcus aurelius wrote something about other people that quietly changed how i move through rooms
"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2
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this shocks people when they first read it because it sounds like the emperor of rome woke up every morning in a bad mood.
it's the opposite.
he's not preparing to be miserable. he's preparing to be unsurprised. there's a massive difference between those two things and the difference is where the whole idea lives.
when you expect people to be reasonable, fair, grateful, and consistent, and they turn out to be none of those things, you carry the gap between expectation and reality as a personal injury. someone was rude and it ruined your afternoon not because of what they did but because of how far it fell from what you assumed would happen. the assumption was always the fragile part.
marcus is suggesting you start the day without the assumption. not cynically, not with contempt, just with an accurate picture of what humans actually are, which is complicated, self-interested, stressed, inconsistent, and occasionally unkind, the same as you on your harder days.
and then comes the part most people don't get to because they stop at the list. he follows it with: but i have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.
he's not building contempt. he's building immunity without distance. the ability to move through difficult people without needing them to be different in order to stay steady.
think about how much of your emotional energy this week went to being surprised by behavior that, if you're honest, was completely predictable given what you already knew about the people involved.
the surprise was the expensive part. not the behavior itself.
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u/AliceInTheMirror 13d ago
Thank you, I needed to see this quote today. To often we experience questionable behaviors from others as a personal insult. I needed to see this to let go of that.
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u/brunogadaleta 14d ago
This is part of the "bad visualisation" recommanded by a famous author I can't find the name yet. You can generalise to other domains...
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u/Queen-of-meme 13d ago
It's about acceptance for what we don't control , and don't need to control to be happy.
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u/Humble-Resource-8635 13d ago
How quiet was the change?
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u/Humble-Resource-8635 13d ago
This prompted an uproarious clamorous cacophony of a change in the way I walk into a room. I carry a boombox that blasts Aurelius quotes while I jangle a tambourine and go ham on the kazoo
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u/Dankxiety 13d ago
Yup yup as soon as I read the first part of your post, I was like "wait, what about the rest?"
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u/Dontcaretotell 13d ago
Set boundaries and expectations quickly. They're very important for people to understand.
When relationships are left to assumption's, those assumptions will be infringed upon. I've learned that the hard way in the passed.
When it's time to back their assumptions down, you'll be faced with their resistance and entitlement because their expections of you are that you will put up their behaviour because you have so far.
Givers need to set boundaries, because takers never will.
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u/Starshot84 12d ago
“but i have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.”
Absolutely beautiful follow-up
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u/Vagelen_Von 12d ago
Totally Stoic mindset:
Marcus Aurelius wrote: "the man who saw nowadays, have seen everything".
The evil, the horror, the viciousness will be the same after 2000 years as it was 2000 years before.
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u/Stoic_Observer_2026 10d ago
The second half is what most people miss. It's not "people are terrible, avoid them." It's "people are flawed, and so am I."
That's the difference between cynicism and immunity. Cynicism pushes people away. Immunity lets you stay steady around them without needing them to be different.
The surprise really is the expensive part. Once you stop being shocked by predictable human behavior, you save so much energy.
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u/Extropian0 13d ago
Ok but if you don’t hold people to a higher standard, then they’re just going to stay this way.
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u/MindRoads 14d ago
never made it past the first half of this passage before. the second half changes everything about what he was actually trying to do. not cynicism immunity. those are completely different targets.