How Marcus Aurelius and A$AP Rocky Changed My Life

With the new year approaching, it seemed like an appropriate time to try and sum up everything that has happened this year. 2017 has been fascinating. It began with a final, confused, yet desperate, attempt to break into investment banking in hopes of entering an industry where I would be making money, be regarded as successful, have the next five years of my career planned out, and be too busy to think about what the hell I actually want to do with my life — a question many people my age face and end up drowning out with Piña Coladas and prestige. Well I couldn’t go to Cabo and I got rejected from just about every investment bank I interviewed with so…..

In a somewhat dazed trance, I continued to fumble through the semester, haphazardly attempting to find something to do over the summer and awkwardly answering questions about what internship I had from well-intentioned friends. I grew to really hate the shallow words of sympathy and encouragement. That ineffable feeling you get when someone pities you gave me this internal anger to completely reject their way of life and prove to them that there are other, better, ways to “be successful.” It feels uncomfortable even writing about this as it really reveals to me how much I had let my individuality and autonomy go — how I was letting my self worth be dictated by the labels I was associated with. In hindsight, my anger was incredibly hypocritical, naive, and irrational, but it did give me the drive to simply try new things with no expectations.

I started to organically search for wisdom and inspiration to get some guidance and perspective on life. I found that once I left my preconceived notions of a successful life, and opened myself up to other people’s perspectives of the world, I met so many different individuals through their art, heard their narratives, learned their philosophies, and viscerally understood how they experienced life. After going through that, it’s hard to be satisfied by anything short of authenticity in action. The artwork of Marcus Aurelius and A$AP Rocky touched my essence in a way nothing really had before and was most influential in me constructing my own idea of what is important to me.

I came across *Meditations *by Marcus Aurelius (specifically, the Hays translation), almost accidentally, through a Quora answer, and I figured one of the greatest Roman emperors probably had something interesting to say. Outside of my investment banking rejections, discovering this book was probably the best thing to have happened to me. I cannot overstate the level of impact this immortal diary (although he would scoff at that epithet) has had on my life, and I am a little sad that I can’t share every beautiful quote he wrote. If you ever get the chance to read this amazing book, I would highly recommend it, until then I have distilled what I think are his most profound teachings that were the most applicable to my everyday life.

As a bit of a foreword, *Meditations *is a collection of private notes Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself during the last 12 years of his life. It is heavily influenced by Stoic philosophy, but often incorporates other schools of Hellenistic thought. Marcus Aurelius himself was regarded as the last of the five great Roman Emperors, presiding from 161 AD to 180 AD, during a time plagued with war and internal strife. To grasp the depth of his virtue, it is important to understand the gravity of his position in that time period, as as he was easily the single most powerful individual on the planet. He could literally do anything he wanted, yet he held on to his philosophy. The last 12 years of his life were far from easy and you get glimpses of the weight he bore on his shoulders — the understanding that death was slowly approaching. What makes *Meditations *such a powerful read is that it was meant to serve as a guideline for Aurelius himself, never to be read by outside eyes, and thus is a raw reflection of his soul, unpolluted by excessive prose or the need to abstract academic arguments. So what can we learn from this philosopher-king?

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“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” “Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is what you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned to you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and it will never return.”

A core part of Stoic philosophy, and especially Meditations, is the idea of unconditionally owning your life. No matter the injustices that happen to you, it is ultimately up to you to try and achieve the life you want as you are the only one that is ever going to experience it. Aurelius views life as a gift from the divine, and to waste it away without liberating yourself as something deeply sinful. This idea of self sovereignty and individual responsibility is deeply emphasized throughout the text, but is difficult to internalize. Yet to do so is crucial. On one hand, you can, perhaps even rightfully so, blame the shortcoming of your life on external factors and earn the sympathy and reassurance of your peers — but their words do not matter as they can’t change anything. All they can provide is a shallow comfort from reality. It never lasts. The only thing you can do to change anything is to take action, to take control of what you can and to try, with every ounce of will you can muster, to do something about it while you still can.

~

“Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it. And those are the ones who shone. The rest — ‘unknown, unasked for’ a minute after death. What is ‘eternal’ fame? Emptiness.

Then what should we work for?

Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.”

Death is a theme Marcus Aurelius explores often. He sees the futility in attempting to live life in chase of immortality through legacy. Because life is only experienced in its totality by the person who lived it, the only life that has value is one that adheres to fundamental principles and individual values. There is no sound rationalization for an action that makes you diverge from the person you want to be, the ideas you want to represent, and the life you want to lead. Throughout my own past, and what I see happen to my friends, is this pressure, verging on the point of indoctrination, to pursue your passions once you are well settled and justify inauthentic acts on the basis of necessity. It’s absurd because being “well settled enough” recursively defines itself as just the next promotion or next opportunity. It never comes. Of course, I used to say, I’m different from everyone else and all I really need is a prestigious brand on my resume so that I can “realistically” do what I want, and everyone agrees because that is their rationalization as well, and there is comfort in numbers. But you cannot ignore the haunting dissonance caused by the contradictory nature of that thought. Breaking out of this toxic cycle and living a life that you know to be good is what Aurelius encourages everyone to do. The underlying goal is to live authentically, not so that people remember you as such, but so that you know yourself to be good. That is all that really matters.

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“Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains what it was — no better and no worse. This applies, I think, even to “beautiful” things in ordinary life — physical objects, artworks. Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing.”

The first time I came across this passage, I found it to be fascinating as it presented a new way of looking at the world. It is quite similar in its core message to the passage above, but it is communicated in a different way, and able to communicate a cliche in a refreshing fashion that still makes you think displays Aurelius’ acute understanding of the world. You must distance yourself from words, both in praise and in shame, and believe in what you know to be true. I found it interesting that he chose to show the meaninglessness of praise, rather than the common method used by inspirational personalities that focuses on overcoming negativity. It communicates a sense of meditative serenity. In our lives, if people are pressuring you to do something antagonistic to who you are as a person, no amount of peer approval takes away from the fact that it is an ignoble act. This is something that often hinders us as young adults. You cannot let other people define right and wrong, beauty and inelegance, or symphony and cacophony, because you are given the incredibly profound gift of experiencing it for yourself.

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“You’ll find that none of the people you’re upset about has done anything that could do damage to your mind. But that’s all “harm” or “injury” could mean. Yes, boorish people do boorish things. What’s strange or unheard-of about that? Isn’t it yourself you should reproach — for not anticipating that they’d act this way? The logos gave you the means to see it — that a given person would act a given way — but you paid no attention. And now you’re astonished that he’s gone and done it. So when you call someone ‘untrustworthy’ or ‘ungrateful,’ turn the reproach on yourself. It was you who did wrong. By assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust. Or by doing them a favor and expecting something in return, instead of looking to the action itself for your reward.”

No Stoic text can be complete without such a principle — that there is so much that you can’t control, and that’s okay, because what you can control is the way you perceive what happens to you. Very little of what people say and do to you really hurts you fundamentally as a person, unless you let it. Because you have that final say, Aurelius shifts the burden to you. It is silly and unproductive to get mad when people betray your trust, or hurt you in whatever way, as that is what flawed people do. Few people would disagree with the fact that humans are flawed creatures, subject to the whims of their instincts and emotions; therefore, being appalled when a flawed person does something wrong is your fault. No one would be shocked at the possibility of getting bitten by a snake on a trail because we understand that it is a natural thing for snakes to do. To expect them to do anything else would be arrogant. To expect flawed people to not do what is natural to them, or, even worse, to expect them to be flawed to everyone else besides you is despotic. What we need to work on is how we perceive the situation. When judging your own actions, also understand that you also can not be perfect, and that is okay as long as you strive to be better.

~

“Human life.

Duration: momentary.

Nature: Changeable.

Perception: dim.

Condition of the Body: decaying.

Soul: spinning around.

Fortune: unpredictable.

Lasting Fame: uncertain.

Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.

So what can guide us?

Only philosophy.

Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or dishonestly and with imposture, not dependent on anyone else’s doing something or not doing it. And making sure that it accepts what happens and what is dealt as coming from the same place it came from.”

This is perhaps one of the most profound passages I have ever read and I am inclined to limit my analysis so as to not accidentally dilute its message. It is something that struck me as true wisdom. It also summarizes well what Marcus Aurelius thought of the human condition and the way to deal with the futility we all feel. It paints a brutal picture of the human condition, yet gives us reprieve in a way that sounds honest and attempts to illuminate, as opposed to being preachy with the intent to convince. Ultimately, we trend towards death along a chaotic path, and the only thing we can do to ground us and be happy is to be true to the philosophy we believe in. He encourages us not to view philosophy as a teacher, but rather as a framework to fall back on when being honest to your virtues sounds less like a truth and more like a Care Bears cliche.

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I often find myself turning to the words of Marcus Aurelius whenever I feel anxious about life and need to be grounded. I genuinely view reading his texts as something that gave me the courage to take my life into another direction. I hope you do not dismiss what he has to say as the abstract musings of an individual safely tucked away from the brutalities of life. That could not be further from the truth. We must remember that this is not an organized body of text, rather the diary of an emperor in the final years of his life, hoping to remind himself of what was ultimately important. Marcus Aurelius was one of the few leaders in history that was able to reject the seduction of power, in favor of the nobility of virtue. The level of relatability people have with this text after a millennia only vouches for the inherent truths of life it speaks to. This is only a small snippet of what *Meditations *has to offer, but I hope it gave some inspiration. It would be arrogant, and totally dishonest, for me to say that I now live life according to every principle I respect, but it gave me the strength to try.

Tangibly,* Meditations* led me to have the confidence and willingness to pursue work in blockchain, a technology I believed in deeply at the philosophical level, as an actual career. I had tried in the past, yet gave up at the steep learning curve on the assumption that I would probably be pursuing a prestigious career in finance anyways and could understand it later on in life. Marcus Aurelius made me confront the obvious dishonesty in such a statement. I’m lucky to say that in my case it led to me to hustle for opportunity in blockchain — culminating with advising a company I helped create and joining a Venture Capital firm I love.

Whereas Meditations and Marcus Aurelius helped me find the courage and inspiration to become the person I am today, A$AP Rocky, the focus on the second part of this blog post, gave me the confidence to look into the future and dream big. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!