You can blame other people for a lot of things. Marcus Aurelius is not interested in that.
In Meditation II.16, he writes that the soul does violence to itself. Not someone else doing it to you. You doing it to yourself. He then lists five specific ways.
This is not a comfortable passage. Jimmy considers it one of the most honest things Marcus ever wrote.
The First Way: Anger at What Happens
The soul does violence to itself when it becomes, as far as it can, an abscess and a tumor of the universe, when it grumbles at anything that happens.
Marcus says that getting angry at what happens — at the circumstances of your life, at the events that arrive whether you want them or not — is a separation of yourself from nature. Not a moral failing. A structural error.
His argument: the universe operates by its own laws. When you get angry at what those laws produce, you’re essentially arguing with physics. You might as well be angry at rain for being wet.
That doesn’t mean you accept everything passively. Marcus was not passive — he fought wars, managed crises, made hard decisions every day. It means you don’t spend your inner life in a constant state of grievance about the way things are.
The Second Way: Turning Away From Others
The soul does violence to itself when it turns away from another person or moves toward them to harm them. Marcus is more specific than he sounds.
Turning away means the deliberate withdrawal of goodwill. Not just physically leaving a room but closing off another person — deciding they don’t merit your engagement, your concern, your cooperation. He’s already established in Meditation II.1 that we are made for cooperation. Turning away from that is turning away from what you are.
Moving toward another person to harm them is obviously worse. But Marcus lists them together because he sees them on the same spectrum: both are violations of the cooperative nature he believes is fundamental to what human beings are.
The Third Way: Being Overpowered
This one surprises people: the soul does violence to itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or pain.
Both. Pleasure and pain equally.
Marcus is not against pleasure. He’s against being controlled by it. The Stoic position is the insistence that you remain the author of your own state. When pleasure runs you, you’ve handed that authorship over. When pain runs you, same result.
The goal is to feel both without being governed by either. That sounds easier than it is, which is probably why Marcus kept having to remind himself of it.
The Fourth Way: Insincerity
The soul does violence to itself when it does or says anything insincerely or untruthfully.
Playing a part. Saying what the room wants to hear. Performing a version of yourself that isn’t you. All of these, Marcus says, are self-inflicted wounds.
This connects to one of the entries in Meditation I where he thanks one of his teachers for teaching him to be straightforward. The opposite of straightforward — the insincere performance of a self you don’t actually inhabit — is not just dishonest to others. It’s dishonest to yourself in a way that damages something.
The Fifth Way: No Aim
The soul does violence to itself when its actions and impulses have no aim.
Rudderless. Moving through life without intention. Doing things because they present themselves rather than because you’ve decided they matter.
Marcus connects this directly to reason. The rational soul, for him, is one that operates purposefully — that can account for why it’s doing what it’s doing. When that capacity is offline, when you’re just reacting, just moving, just occupying time — something essential is absent.
The Question He’s Really Asking
Marcus wrote these five things to himself. Which means he recognized these five tendencies in himself. Which means the Emperor of Rome was getting angry at circumstances, turning away from people, being run by pleasure or pain, saying insincere things, and acting without aim.
Probably not all at once. Probably not all the time. But often enough that he needed to write them down and look at them. Reminders.
Which one is yours? You probably know. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
Read the Meditations with Jimmy at readingwithjimmy.com. Questions and reactions to [email protected].