Don't Strip Away the Legends: My Feud with a Roman Emperor

Marcus Aurelius does a fantastic job articulating the view of the world I continually find myself fighting against. It’s a beautiful perspective. I just happen to be utterly repelled by it.

This is from Book VI of Meditations:

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool died with shellfish blood. Or making love—something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid.

Perceptions like that—latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them. [Emphasis added.]

A beautiful perspective, right? Sure…if you want to be a stick in the mud. A sad-eyed Eeyore complaining nonstop about the colorlessness of the world.

No doubt it’s fine to occasionally see things “as they really are.” But every time you do this, if you let your mind think in this way for just a bit too long, you inevitably end up turning this perspective on your own body. Doing so, you can’t help but to see yourself in a cold, wet grave being eaten by worms.

Compare this to the polar-opposite perspective, where you take a mundane thing and layer legends on top of it. Far from ending up as worm food, this perspective leads you to transform yourself into a celestial being lilting through your own personal version of paradise.

In a universe devoid of consciousness, Aurelius’s perspective is the only one that makes sense. It takes a conscious mind to turn grape juice into a noble vintage. Yet since the universe does have conscious minds—hello! smiley face emoji!—we’d be total idiots not to appreciate this power.

Even if you’re a normie in the suburbs, you are, in reality, the hero of an epic story. If you can’t see this—you simply need to layer some legends into your day.

Legends are everywhere—everywhere you want them to be. Even in your shitty suburb. Even in your claustrophobic bedroom with beige walls and popcorn ceiling.

Just think: Your mind is a million buckets of color and your thoughts are paintbrushes. Your primary role in life is to be a painter.

Don’t waste any time stripping away the color.

Paint.