Happy Birthday, Roman Empire.

January 16th marks the traditional founding of the Roman Empire in 27 BC. 

191 years after the founding of the Empire, the current leader, a man named Marcus Aurelius, sat in a tent on the northern frontier of his empire. It was winter and cold, somewhere in what is now Germany. He was on the front lines of a brutal war against the Marcomanni, some of the most feared Germanic tribal warriors Rome had ever faced. At the same time, his empire was fighting another major war against the Parthians across the eastern provinces, stretching from the Arabian Peninsula deep into Asia. And he wrote. 

As emperor, Marcus could have remained in Rome, insulated by marble walls, ceremonies, and comforts. Instead, he chose to live among his soldiers, sharing the same cold, uncertainty, and risks. It was there, alone in his tent, that he spent hours studying and writing his thoughts. We don’t know exactly how those thoughts were recorded, either penned by hand onto wax tablets or dictated to a scribe who wrote on papyrus; but we do know they survived. We now call these thoughts Meditations.

Marc has been dead for nearly 1,850 years. And yet these private thoughts of his, which were never intended for public consumption, are still read and quoted by business leaders, athletes, writers, and heads of state. Numerous U.S. presidents have publicly referenced the book dating back to John Adams. That alone should give you pause.

What makes his writings endure is not the prose or beauty, it’s the accuracy in how he describes the human condition with an almost uncomfortable rawness. And to remember it’s the inner most vulnerable thoughts of the most powerful man on earth who is telling you this, it is a beautiful reminder never to put your own thoughts beyond reproach. At times, Meditations reads like a man barely holding himself together. And that makes sense because that’s all of us everywhere throughout history. 

Aurelius was married for three decades. He and his wife, Faustina, producing at least thirteen children. But only a handful survived into adulthood. During his reign, the empire was ravaged by the Antonine Plague: a pandemic that may have killed between 10% and 25% of Rome’s population. For context, World War I killed roughly 1.5–2% of the global population, and World War II approximately 3%. Add to that two actual wars that consumed the edges of the Empire, constant political pressure, and the weight of running everything virtuously with unbalanced, absolute authority and you believe stories how he was a man insulated by ego or insecurity, surrounding himself with yes men sycophants and the comforts of the highest office.

Yet Marcus begins his writings not with a single complaint, but with gratitude. Page after page, he thanks the people around him for shaping his character. He thanks teachers, mentors, and even those who embodied traits he wished to avoid. He shared power with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus, a man driven by ego and excess, but Marcus chose cooperation over ego. Everywhere he went, Marcus was admired not for force or charisma, but for his discipline, temperance, and fairness. 

He is often called the philosopher king not because he talked about virtue, but because he tried, daily, to live it. 

You’ve likely heard some of his most famous lines, passed down through modern translations: reminders that you control your judgments, not events; the obstacle is the way, that you should not waste time arguing about what a good person is, just be one.

Marcus died in 180 AD at the age of 58. If you’ve seen the film Gladiator, he’s portrayed as the aging emperor who intends to pass power to a virtuous general played by Russel Crowe instead of Joaquin Phoenix, Aurelius’ real-life son. Interestingly, real life was less dramatic but much more tragic. His son, Commodus, inherited the empire and immediately proved to be the antithesis of his father. He was impulsive, driven by ego, and exceptionally cruel. Expectedly, he was assassinated at only 31, strangled by a wrestler after an earlier poisoning attempt failed.

One stain on Marcus’ legacy remains his administration’s persecution of Christians. This is not easily dismissed. Jesus had been executed by Romans roughly 130 years earlier, and Christianity was still viewed as a destabilizing sect rather than a world religion. Moral frameworks were in flux, but history rarely offers clean heroes.

So what was Marcus’ religion?

Officially, Rome was polytheistic. Gods governed crops, war, weather, love. But among the educated class, philosophy mattered more than ritual. Marcus was a Stoic.

Stoicism emerged from the same intellectual lineage as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For thousands of years, humans have been asking the same question: how should one live and do it best? We are two millennia removed from these men, and if you read today’s headlines, you might think we’ve learned very little. 

Which raises a question. Is this working as intended?

For most of human history, the primary purpose of life was survival. Staying alive outweighed nearly everything else. Loyalty to state, religion, addiction, even suicide; these were deviations from that singular goal.

Today, survival is largely handled. And that has created something we intended: a secondary purpose. But in 2026 as an American, it has seemed to become a burden for a lot of us. 

Here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine your ancestor from 10,000 years ago is brought to 2026. You are both dropped into a large, quiet field for four hours. No threats. No people. Mild weather. You’ve eaten, you’re hydrated, you’ve used the restroom. But no phone, nothing to read, no one to talk to. You can’t sleep. 

If you’re like most people today, that scenario sounds uncomfortable, boring, maybe even unbearable. Four hours alone with nothing to do? No screen? No distraction?

To everyone of your ancestors, it sounds like paradise.

Same species. Same brain. Same survival instinct. Completely different experience.

The difference is the environment.

What is around you controls how you think. What you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, you must process in some way. As Connor McCarthy says in The Road, “You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” If you don’t understand something but take it as a blind truth, your world is easily shattered when truth is interjected. Remember that. That’s the human condition at its core. Your perceptions are made up of what you see and the relationship you have with those memories and what’s actually in front of you. 

What’s your present relationship with memories? Who controls who? Did you know you can choose which memories to remember versus the ones chosen for you? Childhood amnesia is a response to trauma that protects your mindset going forward. Why you don’t like certain foods can be tied to a traumatic experience nearby in time or space to the event. The entire relationship you have with a person can depend on if their name or face reminds you of the memory of a bad actor in your life. A place can become a sanctuary just because of a fond smell. 

The split second perceptions of events, your memories of them, and your expression of them are all you have. So why aren’t you doing more to cultivate a perception that aligns with the life you want to live? Because you’re letting your face sense too much. It’s not your fault. I should keep saying that like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault. It was Steve Jobs’ fault. It's now AI and algorithms fault. But it isn’t your fault this happened. 

This was the expected result of the trajectory of where we’ve been trying to get civilization. We got there, and now, according to THE metric that measures our primary purpose, we’re sliding backwards. That’s right, life expectancy is going backwards. While we’ve been focusing on finding “purposes” and finding our “calling” we’ve all ben letting the primary purpose suffer: we’re dying sooner and it’s all our fault. So what do we do about it?

Turn off the screens.

Humans have expanded the number of scenes they can witness things on at an unprecedented rate: first the printing press, then the telegraph, then television, and now the internet and smartphones. We are no longer limited to our immediate environment amd can escape instantly.

And escape, it turns out, is expensive.

Discomfort and failure have always been part of human training. Avoiding them weakens something fundamental in all of us. We seemed hardwired to do best when we struggle and fail often. Modern neuroscience confirms this: impulse control strengthens with resistance. There is an actual region of the brain called the anterior midcingulate cortex and it grows when you do difficult things you’d rather avoid. It shrinks when you give in to comfort.

If this were a business, you’d track that. You’d measure progress. So why don’t you do that with your life? Marcus did. Alone in a tent. During a war. By writing.

Journaling is not a diary. It is not venting. It is governance.

It is the act of taking stock of where you are, where you should be, and what must change. It creates a record of intention, failure, and progress. Written words force clarity. They remove ambiguity.

As a lawyer, business owner, husband, and father, the most valuable phrase I know is simple: put it in writing. Marcus understood that two thousand years ago and it kept him and his empire stable. 

If his son had done the same, perhaps the Roman Empire would have lasted beyond Commodus’ reign. Instead, he was the catalyst for its eventual demise. 

Happy Birthday, Roman Empire.