On Our "Virtual Route 66" With #RandomThoughts For the Week

 

It wasn’t great. It was heartbreaking. They lied to us. They stole from us. They betrayed the faith and confidence we had in them. We thought better of people and then people showed us who they are…

It’s a story as old as it gets. Marcus Aurelius felt it when Cassius attempted his coup. Maybe he felt it with his step brother Lucius Verus. Epictetus, waking up to find his house broken into, his shrine desecrated. Imagine the feeling of Rutilius Rufus, learning that he’d been found guilty of trumped up charges by his peers back in Rome (this story in in Lives of the Stoics).

Marcus Aurelius would say that the best revenge for these kinds of thingswas to not be like that, to not be like the people who had done such a thing. He’s right, but that doesn’t change that we’re still hurt. “Which way to forgiveness?” Tom Petty sings in “It’s Time To Move On.” It’d be wonderful if this was a destination we could head towards, somewhere that allows us to discharge the anger or resentment or grief we feel.

But there isn’t. It’s not a light switch. It is instead work that we have to do. The comedian Pete Holmes (a great Daily Stoic podcast episode here) has talked about how whenever he thinks of his parents, he tries to say to himself “I forgive them.” It’s not a magical incantation, but it’s part of the work, part of the healing. We can imagine Rusticus in exile, trying not to be consumed by bitterness, trying to remember that the people who did this to him were human, were flawed, were suffering their own consequences for choosing to be this way. We can imagine Marcus Aurelius trying to practice clemency for his enemies (perhaps he even read Seneca’s essay on this very topic!).

Forgiveness is hard work. It doesn’t come immediately or easily. But it’s the only thing that will heal us. The only way we can keep going in this life.

When you consider the insane amounts of money that some people feel the need to accumulate, when you see their estates, when you see them pinch every penny, what they’ll do for a dollar, when you reckon with the costs—to family and friends—it took to earn all this, you might assume they get to take it all with them when they die.

Of course, we don’t. The Roman poet Juvenal joked that while Alexander was living, the whole world could not contain him, but in death, a coffin was sufficient. The humbling wisdom of this joke is one we ought to remember too, as we save ‘for retirement,’ as we ‘invest for the future,’ as we ‘build our legacy.’

It’s very cheap to be dead.

You won’t need any of this when you’re gone. You won’t be able to appreciate your posthumous fame, as Marcus Aurelius pointed out, just as you won’t be able to reap the appreciation of your investments. Your legacy, your intellectual property rights, your real property—all of it will become utterly irrelevant to you one day soon. All of it will become completely worthless…not objectively but subjectively.

Can you let that sink in? Can you make better—more temperate, moderate—decisions today in light of it?