Stoic lessons: circumstances don't define you, and history repeats

Executive overview

Failure and success are both imposters. Grant sold firewood after West Point — and refused to be ashamed. Marcus Aurelius watched empires rise and fall and saw that human life stays essentially the same across centuries.

Neither your lowest moment nor your highest position says anything about your character — only how you conduct yourself does.

Grant and the stoic view of circumstance

• Grant, reduced to selling firewood after a decorated military career, told an old acquaintance he was "solving the problem of poverty"
• Epictetus: what matters is not what we bear, but how we bear it
• Cleanthes was a water carrier in Athens and saw no shame in it
• Honest work feeding your family is not failure; dishonest shortcuts are
• Grant's firewood years were temporary — he later commanded the Union Army and became president
• He refused to let high positions define him either, accepting success "without arrogance"

History as a flat circle

• Marcus Aurelius lists the full sweep of human activity — war, love, scheming, dying — and notes it was all the same under Vespasian, under Trajan, and still now
• Hemingway's epigraph in The Sun Also Rises captures the same idea: generations pass, the earth abides
• People have always believed their era is uniquely different; they have always been wrong
• Marcus struggling to get out of bed in 160 AD is immediately recognisable today
• The Tombstone gunfight at the OK Corral was about open carry in town — the same argument still runs
• Stoicism's reassurance: the hardware and software of human problems haven't changed, so we can calm down

Reading Meditations across time

• Rereading Meditations, the same passages still prompt the same margin notes — across readers, across centuries
• Jefferson had Seneca on his nightstand at death; Cato died holding Socrates
• Engaging with these texts connects you to a timeless tradition, intentionally or not