Welcome to The Stoic Ledger, a daily money meditation from one of the Stoic sages.

56/365: Marcus Aurelius on a sense of injury

Marcus is saying a sense of injury is an internal opinion that we control. A choice. 

No matter how irritating something is, no matter how in the wrong someone is, we always have a choice. 

And that choice is our judgment, our perception, our emotion of the event. We don’t stop and question the way we judge events because it's been ingrained in us for so long. We see the event or person as that thing that irritates me, rather than my irritation at that thing. And there’s a big difference.

Who is in control in the former? Not you.

Adopting this truth gives the kind of power that no recession, no job loss, no external can ever take away.