Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty...

>Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.

1800 years ago, people were doing Gorilla Mindset mantras.

Like you had a great quote then you had to make me want to punch you in the throat by comparing it to gorilla mindset. Congrats

> mike cernovich is a great thinker

t. an intellectual

I read this shit but stopped halfway through because he was just repeating himself endlessly over and over.

But the real fact why I didn't like it was:
He just told me what and how to do but never ever even grazed the "why". I know he was writing the thing for himself, and some things were useful for me, but there was no explanation for his "what". DAE?

There does not need to be a why. Sometimes suffering is meaningless

It's because you're a brainlet.

That's not what I meant and besides, that's not what Aurelius talked about. And he didn't sound like life was meaningless, only that your own will be lost to times and forgotten.

What I meant is that when he talked about what a man should be like - diligent, selfless, blah blah, you know what I mean if you read Meditations - he never actually said why should I listen to him and be like that. It might be self-explanatory why one should should be diligent, but there are many other attributes that he mentioned that are not so clear-cut (or possibly are, but only to him, because he has a certain view on the world).

Great contribution.

I'm merely stating the obvious.

I think I misinterpreted your question. I thought you were saying that Aurelius doesn't provide a philosophy of life, just a way of life. And my answer to you was that sometimes we are unhappy simply because our lives are chaotic and our minds wander. Which is something Stoïcism tries to remedy without always asking why.

I read part of it long ago and I remember that some of the rules were weird, but could probably be explained in their historical context. But other rules of his didn't indeed make a lot of sense. So I agree with you yes.

I didn't really think of any (bar few) of the rules as weird per se (besides the ones concerning gods and shit, which, as you said, are explained by the historical context).
They just seemed like a very personal opinion to me and not as a golden standard that Aurelius seems to put them as. All the more since there was no "why" to his reasoning to sway me on his side.
Though there were some very good points. For example (I'm paraphrasing of course) -- don't be angry at someone who is being a fag, just pity him, because him being a faggot is a flaw that only hurts himself. Or something to that effect.