Marcus Aurelius never wrote his Meditations thinking anyone would read them: they were private notes, in Greek, that the Roman emperor jotted down for himself during military campaigns, roughly between 170 and 180 AD, to remind himself how to stay steady under the weight of power and war. Out of those notes grew one of the most widely read texts in Stoic philosophy, built around an idea that is simple to state and hard to practice: some things depend on us — our judgments, our intentions, how we react — and others don’t — our health, other people’s opinions, traffic, the decisions of those around us. In one of the most quoted lines from Book VIII, the most common translation reads: “You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
This distinction, which Marcus Aurelius inherited from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, didn’t stay confined to antiquity. In the twentieth century, American psychologist Albert Ellis explicitly named Stoic philosophy — and Epictetus in particular — as a direct inspiration for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), one of the foundations from which modern cognitive-behavioral therapy grew. The underlying idea is the same: events don’t disturb us directly — the judgment we make about them does, and it’s exactly that judgment we can work on, regardless of how things go on the outside.
A small practical exercise inspired by this distinction: at the end of a difficult day, try writing down, in two columns, the things that upset you — one “depends on me,” the other “doesn’t depend on me.” A delayed train, a colleague’s judgment, the weather almost always end up in the second column: we can choose to stop fighting them, and put our energy only into what’s truly in our hands, starting tomorrow morning.
Sources
- Marcus Aurelius, Ta eis heauton (Meditations), Books II and VIII, c. 170-180 AD.
- Ellis, A. — founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), who named Epictetus’s Stoic philosophy as a direct inspiration for his approach.
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