Skip to content

Question

What does Marcus Aurelius mean when he says trouble is in your opinions, not outside you?

A look at Meditations 9.13, where Marcus locates all his trouble not in events but in his own judgments about them.

Updated

The short answer

Marcus means that what disturbs him is never the external event itself but the judgment he forms about it. In Meditations 9.13 he corrects himself mid-sentence to say his trouble was not outside him but within, in his opinions, meaning it was something he was actively doing to himself and could therefore stop doing. This follows from the Stoic view that things like pain, loss, and death cannot make a person worse, so they cannot themselves be bad. Only the false judgment that they are bad creates the trouble.

Key points

  • Marcus writes in Meditations 9.13 that he cast out his trouble because it was not outside him but within, in his opinions.
  • This is a private journal note, not advice offered to a public audience.
  • The claim rests on the Stoic argument in Meditations 2.11 that things happening equally to good and bad people, like pain and death, make no one better or worse and so are neither good nor evil.
  • The common misreading treats this as positive thinking, changing your feelings about a bad situation while leaving the situation just as bad.
  • The Stoic claim is stronger: the situation was never bad in the first place, only your opinion about it was.
  • Taking this seriously means examining the specific judgment behind your distress rather than blaming the external event.

The longer answer

The line itself

In Meditations, Marcus writes about a moment of relief: "To-day I have got out of all trouble, or rather I have cast out all trouble, for it was not outside, but within and in my opinions" (Meditations 9.13). Notice the correction he makes mid-sentence. He does not say trouble left him, as though it had wandered off on its own. He says he cast it out, because it was never an external thing to begin with. It was a judgment he was making, and judgments can be changed by the one who makes them.

This is a private journal entry, written by a man to himself, not a public claim meant to persuade anyone else. That matters. Marcus is not announcing a technique for managing stress. He is noting, in the middle of a day like any other, that he had been carrying something around that had no weight of its own except the weight he gave it.

The common misreading

The line gets read as a piece of positive thinking: change your attitude and your problems disappear. That reading keeps the world exactly as threatening as it was and just asks you to feel differently about it, a kind of willed cheerfulness laid over the same facts. It is not what Marcus is claiming.

The Stoic claim is stronger and stranger. Things like death, honor, pain, and pleasure "equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse" and so, Marcus concludes, "they are neither good nor evil" (Meditations 2.11). If a thing cannot make you worse, it cannot make your life worse. Good and bad, on this view, are not properties of events at all. They live only in the judgments you form about events, in your faculty of choice. So when Marcus says his trouble was within and in his opinions, he is not describing a mood he could have chosen to feel differently. He is describing where trouble actually lives, full stop. Nothing external was ever a candidate for being the trouble in the first place.

What changes if you take this seriously

If trouble is a judgment and not a fact about the world, then the work of getting free of it is not distraction, not repression, and not pretending the world is fine. It is examining the specific opinion you have formed. You slighted, you delayed, you were wronged: each of these is already an interpretation, not a raw fact, and interpretations can be checked. Ask what exactly you have judged to be bad, and whether that judgment survives scrutiny.

This is demanding, not comforting. It means you cannot blame your bad day on the traffic, the colleague, the diagnosis, without first asking what you added to it by opinion. It also means the relief Marcus describes, getting out of all trouble in a single day, is available to anyone willing to do the same inspection, not because the world got kinder, but because the opinion got corrected.

The concrete practice is simple to state and hard to do. When you notice you are troubled, do not first ask what happened. Ask what you are telling yourself about what happened, and whether that story is one you would defend under questioning. Often it will not survive the asking, and the trouble Marcus describes casting out will go with it.

Primary passages

To-day I have got out of all trouble, or rather I have cast out all trouble, for it was not outside, but within and in my opinions.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.13 Read in context

Marcus corrects himself mid-sentence: trouble was never something that happened to him, it was something he was doing.

But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.11 Read in context

The reasoning behind 9.13: if a thing cannot make you worse, it cannot be bad, so it cannot be the source of your trouble.

Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse?

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.11 Read in context

Marcus states the test directly: judge whether something touches your character before you call it bad.

Important distinctions

Changing your attitude versus correcting a judgment

Positive thinking asks you to feel better about a bad situation while granting that it is bad. Marcus is making a different and more radical claim: the situation was never bad by itself. What made it feel bad was an opinion you formed about it, and that opinion can be examined and found wrong. The work is not cheering yourself up, it is checking your reasoning.

Objections and replies

Some things really do seem to hurt regardless of opinion

A skeptic will point out that pain, grief, and loss feel bad immediately, before any reasoning happens, and that calling this a mere opinion seems to minimize real harm.

Reply

The Stoics distinguish involuntary first movements, like a flinch or a pang of grief, from the settled judgment that follows. Marcus is not denying that events register on us. He is denying that the initial jolt is the same thing as the trouble he casts out, which is the judgment that the event is bad and that he has been harmed.

If nothing external is bad, why act at all

If death, pain, and dishonor are neither good nor evil, a reader might ask what motivates effort or care about outcomes at all.

Reply

Marcus and the Stoics still call health, safety, and success preferred, and their opposites dispreferred, so there is every reason to pursue one and avoid the other. What they deny is that pursuing or avoiding these things is what makes you good or bad. That verdict depends only on your own judgments and choices.

Practice this in Stoa

Guided courses in the Stoa app that put this into daily practice.

Related questions

Podcast discussions

Concepts

  • The dichotomy of control You will learn why Epictetus draws a hard line between what is up to us and what is not, and why that line is about identity and value, not stress management.
  • Indifferents: what is neither good nor bad Learn why the Stoics called wealth, health, and even death indifferent, and why that word does not mean unimportant.

Works

  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius A Roman emperor's private notebook of Stoic exercises shows what it looks like to practice philosophy under real pressure, not just write about it.

Sources

  1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Primary text, Stoa library