Massimo Pigliucci

So complaining about it becomes a way to wallow in your self-pity or to fuel your own dissatisfaction with the world, which makes the thing worse.

So now you have both an external situation, some aspect of the world that you don't like, and you are making yourself inwardly worse by complaining about it in a way that it gets frustrating because you can't do anything about it.

So I went back to that phrase.

It says, OK, there are bitter cucumbers in the world.

That's a fact, right?

I do not have the power to eliminate bitter cucumbers from the world.

I do have the power to refuse to eat them.

And that's it.

Marcus is absolutely right.

I don't need the additional step of complaining and involving in this fact that the world is so unfair because there are bitter cucumbers.

That was the beginning, or one of the beginnings, because I also got pretty much at the same time another stunning phrase from Epictetus, who was one of the inspirations to Marcus, so the two are very closely related.

Epictetus was another interesting guy.

Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, so literally the most powerful person in the Mediterranean world at the time.

Epictetus was at the opposite extreme.

He was a slave.

He started out life as a slave.

He was actually eventually...

and he became actually one of the most well-known and respected teachers in the Mediterranean area at the beginning of the second century.

So he had a completely different sort of life trajectory.

And yet the ideas, the Stoic ideas, resonated apparently with both of these people, and both of them became major conduits for later generations.