The Low Road Will Always Dog You | Why Marcus Aurelius Didn’t Become Nero
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What choice do we have when faced with difficult people?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. The low road will always dog you. That passage from Marcus Aurelius about how the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way, do you know what he was actually talking about specifically? It wasn't overcoming an injury or a layoff or financial collapse. It wasn't about a reversal on the battlefield. It was talking about difficult people. It was saying that frustrating, infuriating, thoughtless people They are opportunities. When someone is a jerk to you, it's an opportunity to practice virtue and how you respond and not being a jerk back by forgiving them, by standing up for yourself, by empathizing with what they're going through.
Of course, when someone is being difficult, you're tempted to give it right back. You're tempted to go, oh, this is how we're behaving these days. This is what passes for acceptable behavior. But you shouldn't. On a recent episode of the podcast, we were talking with the novelist Maria Semple, who has this amazing book called Go Gentle, which is about a Stoic philosopher. She signed a bunch of copies. We have them in the Painted Porch. It was an Oprah Book Club pick. One of the things she shared was a reminder that she relies on when she's dealing with difficult people.
How can difficult interactions be viewed as opportunities?
Let me play it for you real fast.
a quote that I think I made up that's one of my favorite quotes is the low road will always dog you. Like that basically the high road, you can go to sleep feeling good about yourself. The low road, you might 10 years from now being like walking down the street and going, why did I have to be like cutting to that person in that situation for no reason? And so I think just on a practical level it makes sense to just be virtuous and be the person you want to be because then it's like not clogging up your brain with like regret and okay who's the person i want to be
Mark Stabilis actually reminds himself of this in Meditations, in addition to that famous passage. He says, the best revenge is to not be like that. He was saying that he had no choice about what was done to him, that somebody else took the low road, but he could choose how he responded. He could choose to take the high road. He could choose not to be consumed by anger or a desire. He could choose not to be implicated in their ugliness, which is how he opens that famous passage in book two. He could choose to be the person that he wanted to be. Whenever someone does something to us, minor or major, we always have this choice. We can decide not to be like the people who did us wrong. We can choose the high road.
And we should, because the low road always dogs you.
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