“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by.” – Marcus Aurelius

Accepting and cherishing your own individuality is the most important thing in leading a good life. The greatest step in doing this is focusing your time and energy on people who accept you for what you are. The next part is to learn to live with both the good and the bad things about yourself. The opinion of others shouldn’t matter all that much; as the saying goes, those who mind don’t matter.

Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations wrote, “I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”

This is an excellent observation. American society, in particular, is quite concerned with how you look to others. Despite being taught as children that being unique is important, very little actual emphasis is put on understanding what your individuality means. When someone breaks the norms, many people seem to think that person is being anti-social and rebellious; this is after being told that it’s good to be different. The double standards of how we treat people only as individuals whenever it’s convenient is not only frustrating, it’s hypocritical. 

Society should never tell you who you are, as long as you aren’t hurting anyone, anything, or yourself. You must learn who you are by your own measure. Yes, your friends and family can help guide you towards better self-understanding. After all, they are who you have the best memories with, but also the worst, as well. True friendships are those that can survive the worst times and flourish in spite of them. 

While society’s opinion is noise, the opinions of a trusted few are valuable. It’s imperative to have good, true friends and supportive family members, not fair-weather and fickle acquaintances that masquerade under the title of ‘friend’. Still, even they must be filtered through your own self-knowledge. Yes, it’s wonderful if many people have a good opinion of you, but don’t let others be the most important factor in living your own life. 

When the sun sets, we have to live with ourselves. So, we have to find contentment within ourselves, not simply through the compliments and criticisms of others. Even the most constructive criticism still can’t take into account the most important factor of all: your own perspective. You should come to better know yourself and measure those outside opinions against your own understanding of yourself. 

Above all, the only way to live your life is to frame things as positively as you can about everything you encounter. Life’s too short to remain negative for too long. Considering how the world has treated me, I’ve spent a great deal of my own life being negative. It took me well into my thirties to realize that, for me, living a good life is in finding what you like to do most and trying to make a living out of it. That for me is finding solace in the written word and collecting cardboard artifacts of things I enjoy. What anyone else thinks about it simply doesn’t matter. If my wife is fine with what I’m doing, no one else’s opinion matters.

Perhaps this is the answer to the puzzle Marcus Aurelius posed. We finally learn to live a good life when we stop setting less value on our own opinion than on the opinions of others. In the end, this is the only virtue that truly matters. It’s not about devoutness for any gods, but rather the hard-won contentment of knowing yourself. This is the ‘good life’ Aurelius means: the difficult work of a lifetime, and the only work that‘s truly our own.

~ Amelia Desertsong