Read on its own, the line sounds like the worst kind of morning: a man bracing for a world full of people he can’t stand. Plenty of people quote it exactly that way, as if the Roman emperor woke up sour and wanted everyone to know it.
That reading is the natural one. It’s also, we think, almost exactly backwards.
The words open Book Two of the Meditations, the private notebook Marcus Aurelius kept, mostly while on military campaign, and almost certainly never meant anyone else to read. That matters. Nobody writes a note to themselves to look impressive.
The list is the setup, not the point
Cut the passage off after “unsocial” and you get pure pessimism. Keep reading and it becomes something else. In the George Long translation, the very next line explains why these people act the way they do: “All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.” Then it goes further. Marcus tells himself the wrongdoer shares “the same portion of the divinity” as he does, that he therefore can’t really be harmed by them or dragged into anger, and that “we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids.”
So the passage moves from a grim list to an argument for patience, even kinship. The list is the wind-up; the point is the swing. Gregory Hays, in his 2003 translation, puts the same opening in plainer modern English: “The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” Same list of faults, same turn right after: they’re like this because they can’t tell good from evil.
A morning rehearsal, not a complaint
People who study this text for a living tend to read it as an exercise, not a mood. Donald Robertson, who wrote a book on Marcus, puts it directly: “In The Meditations, Marcus explicitly talks about mentally rehearsing encounters with annoying people, who are deceitful, meddling, treacherous, and so on.” Rehearsing. Not resenting.
Robertson is careful about the charge this line always attracts, that Marcus hated people. On his reading, thinking about other people’s flaws only looks bleak from the outside. “What he says about expecting the worst from other people can perhaps make him sound misanthropic. But he wasn’t. He’s just engaged in a psychological exercise,” Robertson argues.
He doesn’t soften it: anyone reading Marcus as a people-hater is, in his words, “definitely way off the mark.” That’s a strong take, so treat it as Robertson’s argued position rather than proven fact. It rests on something checkable, though: Marcus’s reputation for mercy, and the fact that this notebook was written for no reader but himself.
The exercise has a name in the Stoic tradition. Robertson traces it to the earlier Stoic Seneca: “Seneca calls this the premeditation of adversity, or bad events: premeditatio malorum. It actually resembles a well-established cognitive-behaviour therapy approach called Stress-Inoculation Training,” he says. That link between an ancient practice and a modern therapy is Robertson’s own reading, and some scholars would push back on drawing the line too neatly. He says “resembles,” which is the right level of confidence. Nobody in the second century was running a therapy program. But the basic move, imagining the difficulty in advance so it lands softer when it comes, is old.
We’re not psychologists, and the ancient-to-modern comparison here is one careful expert’s framing rather than settled fact. If difficult relationships or persistent anger are weighing on you, a qualified therapist is a better guide than any passage of philosophy.
Why the cheerful crop gets it wrong
The self-help internet does two things to this passage, and both distort it. The first is the gloomy crop we started with, chopping the line off after the list so it reads as a verdict on humanity. The second, oddly, is a sunnier misuse, where “expect people to be difficult” gets flattened into low-grade cynicism, a permission slip to assume the worst and feel superior about it.
Neither is what the text does. Marcus isn’t lowering his opinion of people. He’s lowering his own capacity for surprise, which is a different thing. The whole passage exists so that when the meddler meddles and the ungrateful stay ungrateful, he isn’t thrown off balance, and, just as important, he doesn’t respond with contempt.
Robertson frames the Stoic aim this way: they want to “anticipate other people’s flaws without judging them harshly, blaming them, or becoming angry with them.” The anticipation serves the not-judging. Strip that out and you’ve kept the pessimism and thrown away the reason for it.
It helps to remember who was writing. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor and practicing Stoic, notes that “Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world at the time, and yet he was dealing not only with major events like revolts throughout the Roman Empire, but also with his wife who was cheating on him, and with some of his advisers who were treacherous.” Some of that rests on ancient gossip and should be read as the traditional story rather than settled history. But the point holds: the man writing “I shall meet with the deceitful” was, by the accounts we have, genuinely surrounded by deceit. He had every excuse for real bitterness. The notebook is him talking himself out of it.
How to use it without going sour
The real test of whether you’ve understood the line is what it does to your mornings. Used well, it isn’t a grievance list.
It’s a way of loading up your tolerance ahead of time. You name, in advance, the friction you’re likely to hit, so that when it arrives it costs you less. The colleague who talks over everyone, the relative who keeps score, the driver who won’t merge: none of them is a fresh outrage if you’ve already granted that people are, sometimes, like this.
Used badly, the same words become a shield for writing people off before the day begins. The difference is the second half of the passage, the part almost every cheerful repost drops. Marcus doesn’t stop at “people are difficult.” He adds that they’re difficult out of confusion rather than malice, that they’re bound to him anyway, and that he’s built for cooperation with them, not war against them. Keep that half and the exercise stays generous. Lose it and you’ve rehearsed your resentment instead.
What we keep coming back to is how forgiving the practice actually is. It doesn’t ask you to like the busy-body or the ingrate. It asks you to see them coming and meet them without the flash of contempt that difficult people usually pull out of us. Read whole, on a hard morning, the line does the opposite of what it seems to. It makes it a little less likely you’ll treat the next person badly.