Ryan Holiday

You know, the types of politicians that we have today, I don't think any of their personalities would be surprising to the Stoics.

Some of the political dysfunction we have certainly would have been familiar to Cato or to Seneca or to Marcus Aurelius.

Maybe there was anything that they would be surprised by.

It would be the progress that we've made, the way we've gotten out of some of these traps, some of the vexing sort of problems that we've

The things we've been able to tackle as a society over the intervening 2000 years.

But one of the things that you get when you study the Stoics is all the similarities.

And then you're also struck by some of the unfathomable differences.

You know, the past is a foreign country, they say, but but not not a radically unfamiliar country.

foreign country.

And I think that's always what is so striking about meditations.

Like on some level, Marcus Aurelius' life and the role that Marcus Aurelius lived should be incomprehensible to us.

I mean, this is a guy with an arranged marriage.

This is a guy who's the head of an enormous empire.

This is a guy who owns slaves.

This is a guy writing in a foreign language.

You know, there are all these ways that he shouldn't be

like us.

And yet he still has to get out of bed in the morning and he still is insecure or has anxiety or has ambitions.

He's still fundamentally a human being.

And I think that's what makes him so recognizable and relatable to us.