Rehearse the Bad Morning Before It Happens

One of the most famous passages opens the day like this: "When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly." This isn't pessimism — it's a technique Stoics call premeditation of adversity (premeditatio malorum).

By rehearsing difficulty in advance, Marcus disarms it. If you expect rudeness, obstruction, and setbacks, you meet them with equanimity instead of shock and outrage. The surprise, not the event, is what usually knocks us off balance.

Crucially, Marcus adds compassion to the exercise: difficult people act badly because they can't tell good from evil, and they share the same nature as him. So he resolves not to hate them but to work alongside them, "as the upper and lower rows of teeth" are made to work together.