Marcus Aurelius on Dealing With Difficult People
Marcus Aurelius wrote more about other people than almost any other topic in the Meditations. He found people frustrating. He also thought carefully about why, and what to do about it — from primary Stoic principles rather than from patience alone.
Marcus Aurelius opens Book Two of the Meditations with a note to himself about what to expect when he wakes up:
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.1, trans. George Long
This is not a man who found other people easy. The Meditations are full of passages about irritation, about people who do not reason, about the difficulty of dealing with those who are dishonest or thoughtless or simply obtuse. Marcus spent decades as emperor — the most scrutinized and demanded-upon person in the Roman world — and the strain is visible in his notes.
What makes the Meditations useful on this subject is not that Marcus had a trick for finding people pleasant. He did not. It is that he had a philosophical framework for understanding why people behave as they do and what a proportionate response actually looks like.
Why people act badly, in Stoic terms
The foundational Stoic claim about bad behavior is this: people act wrongly because they hold false beliefs about what is good. They are not, in the Stoic view, choosing evil knowingly. They are mistaken about what constitutes benefit and harm.
Marcus states this repeatedly, in slightly different forms:
"People exist for one another. You can instruct or endure them."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.59, trans. Gregory Hays
And more explicitly:
"Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?"
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.30, trans. Gregory Hays
The second passage is doing something specific. Marcus is not asking you to excuse the behavior. He is asking you to locate a similar error in yourself — which both reduces the sense of moral superiority that makes anger feel righteous, and reminds you that bad behavior is a human failure, not a uniquely targeted attack on you.
The two moves Marcus makes
When Marcus encounters difficult behavior, he tends to make two distinct moves.
The first is to ask what internal state produced the action. If someone is dishonest, what false belief led them to think dishonesty served them? If someone is cruel, what are they afraid of? This is not a therapeutic exercise in sympathy. It is a Stoic analysis: actions flow from judgments, and bad actions flow from wrong judgments. The person who acts badly is, by definition, in error.
"If they have erred, instruct them kindly and show them their mistake. If you are unable to, blame yourself, or blame nobody."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.4, trans. George Long
The options are limited and precise: correct the error if you can, accept it if you cannot, and do not add suffering by blame.
The second move Marcus makes is to place the difficult person's behavior in the context of oikeiosis — the Stoic claim that we are made for cooperation:
"We are made for cooperation, 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."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.1, trans. George Long
This reframes irritating behavior not as a personal affront but as a departure from the person's own nature. The difficult person is acting contrary to what they are made for. This makes their behavior sad rather than threatening — and reduces the sense of personal injury.
On anger and its proper place
Epictetus is blunter than Marcus about what anger at other people actually is:
"It is not the man who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting."
— Epictetus, Enchiridion, 20, trans. Elizabeth Carter
The anger you feel when someone behaves badly toward you is downstream of an assent: you have agreed that their behavior constitutes a genuine harm. The Stoic examination asks whether that is accurate. In most cases — not all, but most — what has actually happened is that someone's rudeness or dishonesty or thoughtlessness has created an inconvenience, and the injury is in the judgment applied to the inconvenience, not in the inconvenience itself.
Marcus does not pretend this is easy. The Meditations are full of self-correction precisely because he kept getting angry:
"How many a Chrysippus, how many a Socrates, how many an Epictetus, have time already swallowed up?"
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.19, trans. George Long
He is reminding himself that even the people who irritated him most will be gone, as will he, as will the incidents themselves. From sufficient distance, the irritation looks small. Marcus was trying to achieve that perspective in real time.
The practice
What Marcus actually does, based on what he writes:
He prepares in the morning, as the passage at the top of this essay shows. He does not assume the day will be easy or that people will be cooperative. He anticipates difficulty and reminds himself of the framework for responding to it before the difficulty arrives.
When difficulty appears, he asks: what belief or fear produced this behavior? Is what happened actually harmful in any serious sense? What does the dichotomy of control say about this situation — what is in my power here?
He does not aim to stop being affected. The discipline of assent does not produce a person who feels nothing. It produces a person who pauses before endorsing the impression that what happened is a catastrophe or an injustice. Most of the time, in the cold light of that pause, it is neither.
"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.7, trans. Gregory Hays
Difficult people are what they are. The question is whether you approach them with an untroubled spirit — not because you like them, but because your peace does not depend on their behavior.
Related: the discipline of assent, oikeiosis, the dichotomy of control, Marcus Aurelius, apatheia.
Sources
- Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. George Long. Available via Perseus Digital Library.
- Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. Gregory Hays. Modern Library, 2002.
- Epictetus. Enchiridion. Trans. Elizabeth Carter. Available via Perseus Digital Library.