"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly."

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2

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this shocks people when they first read it because it sounds like the emperor of rome woke up every morning in a bad mood.

it's the opposite.

he's not preparing to be miserable. he's preparing to be unsurprised. there's a massive difference between those two things and the difference is where the whole idea lives.

when you expect people to be reasonable, fair, grateful, and consistent, and they turn out to be none of those things, you carry the gap between expectation and reality as a personal injury. someone was rude and it ruined your afternoon not because of what they did but because of how far it fell from what you assumed would happen. the assumption was always the fragile part.

marcus is suggesting you start the day without the assumption. not cynically, not with contempt, just with an accurate picture of what humans actually are, which is complicated, self-interested, stressed, inconsistent, and occasionally unkind, the same as you on your harder days.

and then comes the part most people don't get to because they stop at the list. he follows it with: but i have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.

he's not building contempt. he's building immunity without distance. the ability to move through difficult people without needing them to be different in order to stay steady.

think about how much of your emotional energy this week went to being surprised by behavior that, if you're honest, was completely predictable given what you already knew about the people involved.

the surprise was the expensive part. not the behavior itself.

marcus aurelius wrote something about other people that quietly changed how i move through rooms