It didn’t matter that he was powerful. It didn’t matter that he was wise. It didn’t matter that so many people depended on him. It didn’t matter that he kept the same stern and rigorous habits of his youth.

Marcus Aurelius was getting old. He, like all of us, faced the path of time. Indeed, he walked it every day, like we do, going only in one direction—older, further away from our younger self, never to return. We catch Marcus in Meditations as the reality of this is sinking in. He had always meditated on death (that’s what the practice of memento mori was) but now he was no longer a young man. In fact, he was a marked man.

It’s a painful realization, one that too many of us try to deny or distract ourselves from. We push the thought away. We fantasize about breakthroughs in medicine or the discovery of the fountain of youth. We think other people are old, but us? We feel the same as we always do, so we pretend like nothing changed.​

Seneca was rudely shaken from this impression on a visit to his boyhood home. The sight of it was disappointing, especially the old and dying trees which ringed the house. In his youth, the house had been surrounded by lively, fresh, green trees—in fact, he had helped plant them himself. That’s when Seneca got hit with a dose of reality he could not escape: They were the same trees from his youth, and they were coming to the end of their lives, and by extension, so was he.

Again, none of Seneca’s habits—his cold plunges, his strict diet, his workouts in the gymnasium could change this. We all face the path of time. We all get older. We all eventually, inevitably die. We are all marked men.

​Memento Mori.​

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