After reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, I felt compelled to share a few thoughts.

The book places agency at the center of human life and insists that our highest responsibility is the condition of our soul. It wasn’t my favorite read, but it offered a perspective worth sitting with.

Stoicism frames life as a moral duty to rationality: we govern our perceptions and responses to everything around us. We are bound to keep the soul “in shape,” so illness, loss, or bodily failure cannot strip us of who we are. Pain still exists, but it is contextualized. In many ways, it is an uncompromising form of personal sovereignty.

Everything unfolds logically and necessarily within a broader system. Since we exist within that system, our duty is to act in accordance with nature: to be rational, virtuous, aligned with the values that allow the whole to function. To act against those virtues is not merely immoral, but incoherent, as if our own molecules were rebelling against the structure that produced them. Framed this way, life becomes brief, serious, purposeful - a fleeting obligation to play our part well.

There is much to take from this. But I believe Aurelius overlooks something essential: the purpose of the illogical — our emotions.

He insists that emotional restraint is necessary for self-purification. To let a moment pass without attachment, to realize its insignificance in the dimension of time, is considered strength. And yes, if everything changes, attachment is fragile. But emotions are not bugs in the system, and attachment is not inherently unhealthy. Emotion is a feature of the body. Every sensation, reaction, and feeling is part of being alive, not a distraction from it. We are not beings meant to ignore our emotional shell. We are the union of rationality and feeling. An inhabited soul.

Take it further: if everything that happens to us is meaningful precisely because it happens to us, then presence matters. Appreciation is beautiful. Desire is natural. To refuse emotion in the name of discipline risks draining life of color. A perfectly unshaken soul in an untouched emotional world would be sterile. The beauty of life lies in its sensuality, its irrational pull, its capacity to move us. Ignoring that feels less like discipline and more like avoidance. (It may be no surprise that one of my favorite characters is Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

Then there is the question of pure rationality. Rationality is powerful, uniquely human. But some of the most binding forces in life — loyalty, identity, devotion — are not rational. A country, an idea, a shared belief system survives not because it always makes sense, but because people choose to uphold it even when it doesn’t. Without irrational commitment, we lose the ideas that tie us together. The values we hold endure because they are felt, not merely reasoned.

On a personal note, deep illness forced me to reevaluate how I work, what I pursue, and what kind of life fits me. What emerged from that growth was simple but difficult: if something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t right, and needs to be addressed. Acting in alignment with values, instincts, and convictions - with the so-called irrational body - created momentum I hadn’t experienced before. Not by chasing what should work, but by chasing what was true. The results followed quietly, steadily. I wouldn’t trade that clarity for anything.

Meditations taught me that philosophy isn’t something to adopt wholesale. Like business, like life, it must be personalized. There is power in rigid systems - even in religion - but only if they bend enough to include the person living them. Some ideas are worth keeping. Others are worth leaving behind. The value lies in knowing the difference.