If you’re new around here, every week I share wisdom from history’s greatest minds.

The intellectual life is easy.
You can entertain many different philosophies and traditions without ever embodying any of them. There’s no prefect or headmaster to pressure you into conformity of sorts.
This allows you to debate Aristotle’s interpretation of friendship without ever having any real friends. You agree with Hume’s scepticism of cause and effect even though you always jump out of the way when a car is speeding towards you. You understand that the Nazis misinterpreted Nietzsche’s Übermensch—what a bunch of fools—but you’re closer to the big ear man from Zarathustra than to the Übermensch.
Despite all this, how pleasurable it feels to swing your intellectual dick around diner parties, kids’ birthday parties, and charity galas. Displaying how smart, educated, and sophisticated you are. It truly feels good. But if you’re honest, you feel enlightened and, secretly, even superior to others. As if you’re a god walking among plebs—detached from this existence—untouched by the troubles of this world, waxing abstractly about subjects without attachments and care. Indeed, this is the good life.
But more importantly, all this dick-swinging has a nobler purpose. It’s to impress Senior partners at the firm, colleagues, Venture Capitalists, other founders, friends, strangers, and the list goes on…
Yet all of it disintegrates in an instant when you find out your son is dying of Leukemia, or when the doctor tells you your wife may not survive the operation, or your scans confirm you have terminal stage IV lung cancer.
In such moments, the intellectual life crumbles like a house built on sand.
Here, finally, you’re confronted with the rawness of life—the problem of suffering, something no one escapes. And your once big intellectual shlong now shrinks to the size of a raisin on a cold day.
You don’t know how to deal with any of this. All your abstractions are gone, vanished into the ether.
How do you deal with this pain that burns deep into your bones? How do you overcome the sadness of losing your son? How do you mourn the death of your wife, the love of your life? How do you deal with the depression without getting addicted to SSRIs or spiralling out of control? How do you manage to not give up on living a virtuous life? How do you face your pain without stuffing it away and pretending it doesn’t exist? How do you find the strength to not commit suicide?
For all your intellectual superiority, you haven’t crossed the vast chasm that lies between the intellectual and the embodied life. Up till now, you thought you could get away from this. No one runs forever.
But the truth is, the thought of trekking this abyss terrifies most people. Consequently, many people choose to abandon their beliefs and virtues when confronted with suffering. Or pretend there’s no suffering. Or still yet purposely get hooked on drugs and alcohol to quench their pain and their meaningless existence. They would rather continue living as an abstract self than face their fears, finiteness, and demons.
They’re cowards. There are no ifs or buts about it.
Very few choose to transcend the intellectual life by crossing the chasm.
Only the courageous walk this path, and only they find meaning.
But if you’ve read this far already, either you’ve begun crossing the chasm or you no longer want to be a coward. If it’s the latter, it’s because you’re one of the few who will cross this abyss.
You’ve come to understand that only by embodying your philosophy will you find meaning and purpose.
This is what Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, teaches us.
So check out the episode below, and continue reading below for some lessons from Aurelius’ Meditation.
Lessons from Marcus Aurelius
Embody your beliefs. The student as boxer, not fencer. The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again. The boxer’s is part of him. All he has to do is clench his fist.
Your goal in life is simple: live such that what your heart desires and what is good are one. It would be wrong for anything to stand between you and attaining goodness—as a rational being and a citizen. Anything at all: the applause of the crowd, high office, wealth, or self-indulgence. All of them might be compatible with it—for a while. But suddenly they control us and sweep us away.
Stop clinging to the past and wishing for the future. Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.
Live today as if you’ve already arrived at the end. Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able—be good.
If you knew this life was a dream, would you live differently? Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream.
The obstacle in your path is the way. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Embrace today—this very moment, with all your might and live! Everything you’re trying to reach—by taking the long way around—you could have right now, this moment. If you’d only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you’d only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence and justice.
Till next week!