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What We Want (And Deserve) More Than Anything

Daily Stoic Emails

We think we want to be rich. Or famous. Or powerful. We want to succeed, we want to achieve. We want more of this. We want less of that. These desires of ours are explicit, they define our goals and order our priorities. We salivate over them.

But deep down, they don’t reflect what we actually want. They’re proxies, indirect ways of getting to what we’re really looking for.

“I want first of all–in fact, as an end to these other desires,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes in Gift from the Sea, “to be at peace with myself.” Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we think that success will make us feel good. We think that proving people wrong will make us feel better. That externals will bring us internal harmony. But will it? Has it ever?

No. No it hasn’t. It’s interesting, Lindbergh quotes Socrates who prayed that “May the outward and inward man be at one.” Perhaps that’s the mistake we make. We think that perfecting the outward version of ourselves that the world sees will bring us the inner peace we want. But Socrates and the Stoics knew it was the other way around. It’s the inner work that is more likely to bring us the outward success. And more importantly, that the inner work was an end unto itself.

That’s what Marcus Aurelius was doing in Meditations, trying to focus inward on the inner work. Notice he speaks nowhere in those pages about how he will be remembered by history, how long his accomplishments will stand. On the contrary, he was reminding himself how little these things mattered if he did not bring his inner world into harmony with his philosophy. Because no one is going to remember all the things we accomplished after we’re gone, but we will never forget how little joy they brought us while we were alive if they don’t come from the right place, in the right order.