They Felt This Weight | Don't Make Things Harder Than They Need To Be

It’s easy for academics and critics to dismiss the Stoics as depressing or dark. They’re not wrong, exactly, because it’s true: There are some dark and depressing passages in Meditations . Seneca is not always cheerful. Both writers seem to dwell on death , they paint life as something that can be painful and tragic, they speak of Fortune as something not to be trusted—that the ground beneath your feet can shift in a moment, shattering everything around you. But what’s unfair about this criticism, insensitive even, is that it totally ignores the context and the experience of these men— of all the Stoics . Marcus Aurelius buried six of his children. Six! Seneca lost a child and was exiled to a distant island on trumped up charges all at once. Can you imagine what that must have been like for them? “Grief from the loss of a child is not a process,” a mother is quoted as saying in the fascinating book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe which examines the opioid crisis. “It’s a lifelong weight upon one’s soul.” Marcus Aurelius and Seneca bore that weight—of course it shaped what they wrote and thought. There was an exchange between Marcus and his teacher Fronto about how he felt “s…