Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness.
Marcus Aurelius isn't advocating pessimism here—he's describing a mental vaccination. By rehearsing difficulties before they arrive, he transforms them from personal affronts into expected weather patterns, the ordinary friction of living among humans rather than evidence of your own failure. When your colleague takes credit for your work or a friend cancels plans last minute, you're not blindsided by a betrayal of how things *should* be; you've already accepted how things *are*. The genius lies in this: expecting difficulty doesn't make you cynical, it makes you patient, because you've stopped demanding that reality conform to your preferred version of people.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason...”
Marcus Aurelius“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I...”
Viktor Frankl“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca