Free Reign

Derren Brown opens Book Eight of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations with the question Marcus asks and we don't: what are we made for, and is it only pleasure? Then he returns to the hardest Stoic idea to say out loud, that our judgments about things, rather than the things themselves, cause our problems, and to why it sounds like blame. He argues it's the opposite: liberating, once you notice how badly we identify causes anyway. The yawn that drives you mad now is a yawn from childhood.

The turn is an image: a stone thrown in the air. Why call it good going up and bad coming down? Brown pairs it with C. G. Jung's rising and setting sun and his idea of individuation, then points at Marcus himself, near the end of a life, plague around him, his co-emperor already dead. We look back on adolescence and forgive it. Why not look forward to later life the same way?