Good day, Stoics. 🫡
💭 The past keeps getting better, and that should make you suspicious.
Think about a stretch of your life you look back on fondly.
Now try to remember what you were actually worried about that year.
It’s hard. It’s genuinely hard, and there’s a reason.
The worry was real at the time. It just didn’t get saved.
Memory keeps the shape of things and throws out the texture, and the texture was most of the experience.
So you end up comparing today, with all its friction intact, against an edited version of a year that had just as much and lost the file.
You’re not remembering a better time. You’re remembering a time with the anxiety deleted.
That’s not nostalgia being a liar. It’s nostalgia doing its job.
The trouble starts when you use it to make decisions.
When you decide the present is worse, and you’re worse, and something went wrong somewhere you can’t locate.
Marcus Aurelius had a move for this, and it’s oddly practical.
He reminded himself that the people who lived in the supposedly great earlier reigns were dead now, and that they’d spent their lives complaining too.
Same court intrigues. Same grievances. Same certainty that it used to be better.
Every generation has believed it arrived just after the good part ended.
They can’t all be right, and it’s unlikely you’re the exception.
This year is being remembered fondly by somebody in about a decade.
There’s a decent chance it’s you.
📜 STOIC LINE OF THE DAY
“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it is endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.”
💭 GOING DEEPER
That’s Marcus at his most impatient, and he’s being impatient with himself, not with you.
Read alongside it a passage where he lists the emperors before him and notes that their courts are gone entirely.
Same ambitions, same feuds, same conviction that their era mattered most. All of it erased.
He does that not to be bleak but to shrink the present grievance to actual size.
It’s the same instrument pointed two ways.
Looking back, it dissolves the golden age. Looking around, it dissolves the crisis.
Both were always smaller than they felt from inside.
⚔️ TODAY’S PRACTICE
Pick the year you most romanticise.
Write down three things you were genuinely anxious about that year.
Notice how long it took you to find them, and what that means.
❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY
What am I comparing today against, and is that comparison honest?
Hit reply and tell me.
Stay steady. ⚔️
