Ryan Holiday

almost nihilistic.

You know, he says, this is book 636, Asia and Europe, distant recesses of the universe, the ocean, a drop of water, Mount Athos, a molehill, the present, a split second in eternity, minuscule, transitory, insignificant.

You know, there are moments, you know, there's one passage where he goes, what does it matter if you live to be old or not?

What do you care?

There's just some passages where I wouldn't say Marcus seems depressed, but he does seem almost excessively cynical or, yeah, there's just a darkness to it.

And I sometimes struggle with those.

That's not exactly how I think about it.

Yeah.

You know, continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life and the span of things around us, a grapeseed in infinite space, a half twist of a corkscrew against eternity.

So there's something about that that seems kind of sad and insignificant.

And then book 10, 16, the one immediately above it, he says, to stop talking about what a good man is like and just be one.

So there's this kind of tension in Marcus Aurelius where he's like, we're all infinitesimal and small and don't matter.

And, you know, nothing lasts.

And then he's like, but make sure you do good stuff.

You know, that tension sometimes strikes me.

And I think I've wrestled with that for quite some time as I've read meditations.

And I sometimes wonder, like, if you saw him the day that he wrote that, would you be like, oh, he was just in a mood that day?

You know, where is he coming to from that?

I think about that quite often.

Yeah, great question.