I Read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Now I Have More Questions Than Answers

Every week I see someone reading the Roman Emperor's journal on the NYC subway, so I dove in to see the appeal.

Rome from my point of view, 2013

Does your mailbox always scream at you or is it just me who’s perpetually running out of storage?

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a hoarder of words, finding the task of deleting old messages a fool’s errand. I always wonder if bits of wisdom have fallen through the cracks. And time and time again, I’m proven right. See this one, for example; an email to my history professor from 2011:

As an amateur script and short story writer, I’m basically having a hard time trying to write an academic paper. I want to have an introduction, but I always end up writing a paragraph that is more of a story!

And his tactful response:

Think of what you’re doing here as technical writing, like writing the instructions to an alarm clock: how can you convey important information as directly and efficiently as possible? You might think that this is stifling your creativity. However, there is a lot of creativity—artifice and design—in figuring out how to organize and deploy the information. Effective writing tends to mask all the artifice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still there.

So, what you’re reading is indeed an essay about the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher and the last of the “Five Good Emperors” of Rome. Kind of. Because it is also the story of how I picked up the Meditations when I needed someone to tell me I would ultimately be okay and there wasn’t enough wisdom in my mailbox. Just as any attempt at consoling myself goes, I ended up questioning a writer’s role as an observer of the human condition and the futile enigma of our existence.

And I say this, in all seriousness, in 2025, at an East Village bar with spectacular burgers where I ruminate on writing from 170 A.D. and the weight of being human. A good friend of mine told me earlier why she’s unsure about having children. Not climate change or financial instability; but the weight of consciousness. Bringing another one to this world and asking them to live with it. I’m interrupted when one of the bartenders complains to the other about some guy “who has some shit going on and has to figure it out.”

We navigate a world that is transient by choice, as humans that are transient by nature. The paradox that it is, we occasionally wonder if we’re missing out on an epiphany as we do miss out on the present. We throw out takes at each other, letting strangers decide which ones are of value with a click or a tap. That’s not the true art of storytelling. It is telling—of our times, but not of our stories.

I, too, used to have this indescribable urge in my 20s—which, in reality, was an unattainable goal—to tell people something they didn’t already know, didn’t even think of. I had to see what they couldn’t, hadn’t. I sought the thrill of the unmissable moment, of the epiphany. Perhaps, wasting my time on discoveries that were not it at all.

My 30s, they are calmer, different, despite living in a culture that forces writers to constantly create “content” for instant gratification. These years are about welcoming the abundance of questions and the lack of answers, and hence epiphanies. It’s about figuring out whether I have to speak towards a solution, or simply towards a question we’ve all felt burdened by. In a way, writing the instructions to an alarm clock and accepting the fact that I’ll never be the one finding a solution to the way time looks on my parents’ faces each time I see them after a monthslong break.

Being human—let alone being a writer—has always been an isolating task, beyond the years we’ve already spent isolating in our homes due to a pandemic. My current iteration of isolation is one that is familiar; it is due to the bleak state of the world and the crippling responsibility I feel for not working on projects that eventually die in my drafts. Desperate, I looked up what Reddit claimed was “the best existential book” and picked it up. I hoped that the Meditations, written thousands of years ago, could tell me that the questions I have about my place in all this are not new. Perhaps someone’s already figured it out, and words of wisdom fell through the cracks there, too.

Where I dug for answers, however, I found empathy for the human condition, the chronic one it has been. Aurelius very likely saw his words as a manual to mindful living; he does prescribe quite a few solutions that—while repetitive—can be guiding. And yet, I was enamored by his desire—and his desperation—as a writer who simply observes, which overshadowed all the advice he doles out. I saw that the most urgent questions we’ve had about our existence have always been there. And they are not to be answered but to be toyed with, to exercise with to make more space for the unknown, like the universe does every second without knowing where it’s going.

If you’re on the internet—the way Someone-On-The-Internet is, you must have heard about the phenomenon that 21st century men think about the Roman Empire. A lot. Just the other day, I saw an ad where LeBron James was pretending to read the Meditations. An intriguing trend, because in high school, I was forced to read the foil to the Meditations—Machiavelli’s The Prince, a major red flag on a dating app when listed as a “favorite book.” (I did wonder at one point if I’d date Aurelius. He sure had nice hair, he said the world is round, but he did strike me as a guy who’d spend an entire flight staring at the seat in front of him as a testament to his Stoic character. He also repeatedly claimed women were born to be submissive.)

I picked up Aurelius for the first time while I was waiting for the G train in Brooklyn, and my perception of time relied solely on a digital board that stayed stagnant. I looked at the people around me, with tiny little earbuds that I’ve always been afraid would pop out and roll onto the train tracks. Despite my complicated relationship with audiobooks, I listened to Aurelius’ words (on hefty headphones) from a voice actor with a deep British accent. I let him pretend to be an emperor who will never know what an audiobook is—or Received Pronunciation, the preferred accent for villains and Europeans of all kinds in movies and apparently, audiobooks, too.

Someone elbowed me at the Metropolitan Avenue stop in Williamsburg, but Aurelius whispered in my ear: “When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”

That’s fair in practice, and wise. What he suggests so does my therapist, but as I navigated crowds, I was struck not by his exercise of restraint, but what made him write about dealing with people’s opinion of him in the first place: That in 170 A.D., a man, a ruler, grappled with issues that we do today. Two thousand years ago, this man, which means at least one man, was confused about how to navigate society.

Time is the only phenomenon through which we can recognize that our search for meaning—as futile as it has been—has been our truth. It connects us to a shared consciousness; it is the thread that ties us together rather than separate, unlike what some tech bro would like you to believe: That we’re so much better than what came before us in a world where A.I. tries to dictate where our sentence goes next. If it were up to its suggestions, I’d be writing about how much I need to look forward or follow up, while I simply want to look up or heck, follow forward as I deal with my impermanence.

Philosophy and literature are born out of a similar existential need, and yet, are quite different in the way they handle the weight of being alive. Philosophy attempts to formulate a lifestyle, a perspective, or a set of ethics, but it doesn’t give a clear answer to the very logical and yet very metaphysical questions we have about our existence. It helps us get by, but it doesn’t tell us more about why we are humans, a question it constantly probes for an answer—even when the answer is that there is none.

Literature, on the other hand, is about connection, the only solid proof that we’re not alone in all this. That someone has felt the same way despite being of a totally different time and place. And even if we don’t know what a human’s purpose is, at least we know this is what a human is. That we feel and we question and hope to find peace as we undulate between certainty and ambiguity.

A philosopher, Aurelius wrote—likely dictated—his journal which became the Meditations around the same time the New Testament was being written. His Stoicism failed to be as popular as Christianity despite arguing similar core values; of being good, but both ultimately grappled with our existence and sought avenues of purpose.

“The universe is change: life is judgement,” Aurelius says in Book 4. But one thing he will never know is that in spite of the change—the maps that are redrawn, the empires that fall, the people we gain, and those we lose—our existential dilemma will remain the same, which makes the circumstances he describes more eternal than the wisdom they wish to impart.

Where he says in Book 3 “…the defining characteristic of the good person is to love and embrace whatever happens to him along his thread of fate,” I didn’t hear a solution—I am the type who occasionally raises her fist in the sky and complains—but I heard the pain of fate, the unpredictability of human life. In Book 8, where he advises “not [to] elaborate to yourself beyond what your initial impressions report,” I was fascinated to hear that he had just “been told that so-and-so is maligning [him].” In Book 5, he openly asks “was I created to wrap myself in blankets and keep warm?”. These days our blankets may be weighted or synthetic, but the feeling is just the same.

For anyone who feels alone, who is tired of hearing the word “unprecedented,” Meditations are a good reminder that while our tools have changed, and we fly in giant bullets across the sky and have this new limb that is a smartphone, humans haven’t diverged much from our true core; the one that feels anxiety, depression, excitement, joy. The one that wonders what the heck this is all about, and has no choice but to write about it.

Most writing—if not all—either comes down to the same point or is born out of it: That there’s so much we don’t know. And we won’t ever know.

Perhaps, that is the biggest comfort we can find on a page, after all.