What Marcus Aurelius' Meditations Taught Me About Enjoying the Years After Retirement

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is the book behind six practices I've actually started at 66, recorded here as a personal account. Meditations is a collection of private notes the Roman emperor wrote to himself, often between battles or affairs of state — never intended for publication, never meant for anyone else's eyes. It's simply a record of one man trying, night after night or in the middle of a military camp, to steady his own mind while carrying the weight of an empire. Reading it again at 66, I was struck by how directly words written nearly two thousand years ago still speak to where I am today.

Spending attention only on what's within my power, and reflecting on each day.

Practice one: preparing my mind before meeting someone difficult

One of the most famous passages in Meditations is the one Marcus writes to himself upon waking. He pictures, in advance, the ungrateful, arrogant, or dishonest people he might encounter that day — and decides, before he's even out of bed, not to let anger take hold. We weren't born to hate one another, he reasons, but to help one another.

I recognise this. There are gatherings I'd rather skip, and people whose values sit uneasily with mine, that I still have to face. I used to feel the weight building for days beforehand. Now, the night before or that same morning, I put it into words: "I might meet this kind of person today, but I won't hand them my mood." It's remarkable how much smaller the actual encounter feels once I've done that.

Practice two: treating age and decline as part of nature

Marcus writes again and again that everything in this world is in constant flux — flowers bloom and fall, and the body too shifts with the seasons. This isn't misfortune or failure, in his view; it's simply the natural workings of the whole.

In my mid-sixties, I notice the changes daily — less sharp concentration, stiffer joints, less stamina than before. I used to feel a small disappointment each time. Now I try to name it first — "this is part of the natural flow, not some special bad luck reserved for me" — before I let it settle in. Not denying the decline, just refusing to be thrown by it.

Practice three: spending my attention only on what's actually mine to control

At the foundation of Meditations is a distinction between what is within our power and what isn't. Other people's opinions of us, the rise and fall of our wealth, public gossip — these lie outside ourselves, Marcus argues, and don't need to be judged as good or bad at all. What deserves our attention is only our own judgment and our own actions.

Having spent years involved in property and stock investing, I can't honestly say fluctuations in money never bother me. But now, when market news unsettles me, I try to name it: "this belongs to the part of life that isn't mine to control." The same goes for the pain that can come from relationships — the standard isn't how someone else sees me, but only how I chose to act. Thinking this way leaves me feeling, oddly, much lighter.

Practice four: living in this moment, not the past or the future

Marcus writes that the only time a person truly lives is this present instant — the past is already gone, the future hasn't arrived — and so this single instant is also the only thing anyone can ever lose. Whether a life is long or short, everyone ultimately gives up the same thing: this moment, now.

This idea has quietly changed how I spend my days. The few minutes checking on the tomatoes in the greenhouse, the time spent stroking Meg, one dish savoured while wandering Osaka's food streets. I used to treat these as gaps between the "real" items on my schedule. Now I try to notice that this — right here — is the life I'm actually living. Happiness, I've come to feel, isn't waiting somewhere beyond a distant goal; it lives in how this one moment is spent.

Living in this moment, not the past or the future — and the world Marcus Aurelius lived in.

Practice five: quietly doing the work that's been given to me

Marcus treated the role of emperor less as something he chose and more as a duty he'd been given — the way a grapevine's task is simply to bear grapes, a human being has a work that is properly theirs.

Having retired at 65, I've found this a useful way to think about "work" and what a "job search" even means at this stage of life. I no longer need a bigger title. But I do have small tasks that are mine to do now — overhauling the blog's technical foundation, filming videos. Instead of framing these as "still having to work," I've started treating them as the particular task given to me now, one that's mine to carry out quietly. That shift alone has made the work itself feel lighter.

Practice six: where life comes from, and where it goes

Marcus writes repeatedly that human beings are part of nature — born from it, and destined to return to it. It's a way of seeing yourself not as a fiercely separate individual, but as one part of something much larger.

Holding onto this view, I've started to see my own life less as an isolated line and more as one stretch within a much longer current. Born in Hakodate, trained at Tohoku University, now moving between the UK and Osaka. Age, and eventually an ending, sit somewhere further along that same continuous flow. Seen that way, my irritation at simply growing older has, little by little, begun to soften.

Meditations turned out to be a manual for living old age well

What struck me most, finishing the book, is that Meditations is less a two-thousand-year-old philosophy text than an extremely practical manual for how to live right now. How to face people you'd rather avoid. How to receive ageing. How to keep distance from money and reputation. How to spend this present moment. How to carry out the work you've been given. And how to place yourself within something larger than yourself. None of it requires special talent — these are all small habits I can start at 66.

The world Marcus Aurelius lived in, and the man he was

Marcus Aurelius was born in 121 and ruled as Roman emperor from 161 until his death in 180. His reign was anything but peaceful. War with Parthia dragged on in the east, a severe plague (the so-called Antonine Plague) spread across the empire, and fighting against Germanic tribes along the northern frontier continued for years — Marcus himself spent most of the later part of his life at military camps along the Danube. Many of the fragments that make up Meditations are thought to have been written in exactly those camps.

Philosophically, Marcus was deeply drawn to Stoicism from a young age — a philosophy centred on living by reason rather than being swept along by emotion, distinguishing what lies within our power from what doesn't, and bringing oneself into harmony with the order of the universe as a whole. As emperor, he held more power than almost anyone alive, yet lived an unusually isolated existence, constantly bordering on death and betrayal — and it was precisely this position, I think, that made Stoicism something he needed not as abstract knowledge but as a daily practice for holding himself together. What comes through, page after page, is not a ruler eager to display his power, but an introspective, humble one, willing to record his own weaknesses and doubts in plain terms. That a man carrying that much power could also be this quietly unsettled, and left a record of it, is itself, I think, much of what makes this book worth reading.

The book I mentioned here:

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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