Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (for the TikTok age)

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is one of the most influential books ever written.
It’s a cornerstone of Stoicism. It’s taught in philosophy, history, even Latin classes. It’s everywhere — free on Audible, Kindle, you name it.
And yet…
Most people bounce off it.
Why?
Because the prose is dense, formal, and absolutely not written for the TikTok age.
Take a passage like this (you’ve probably seen something similar): Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
(Marcus is reminding himself that he’ll meet annoying, selfish, deceitful people — and that the only sane response is patience, perspective, and cooperation).
It’s powerful. It’s wise.
It’s also… a paragraph you have to fight through.
This meetup is about fixing that.
We’ll take a handful of core paragraphs (in small groups) from Meditations and:

• Strip them down to their essence
• Rewrite them in clear, modern English
• Turn them into 15–30 second “Stoic hits” — phrases, scripts, or concepts that actually land today

Think:

• A single sharp line
• A TikTok or Instagram Reel idea
• A modern translation you’d actually want to share

No prior philosophy background required.
Just curiosity, a willingness to wrestle with ideas, and an interest in making ancient wisdom usable again.
Marcus Aurelius wrote this for himself. We’re rewriting it for now.