Older Than You Think
12 Modern Life Rules and Where They Actually Come From

Scroll long enough and the same advice comes round again in a new font. Sit with discomfort. Cut the noise. Remember you are going to die. It reads as though somebody worked it out last year.

Often the advice is a rerun, and the original is sharper than the copy. The reverse happens too, and it is the more interesting case: a modern idea gets dressed in an ancient costume, and the label travels with it.

Twelve rules, traced to where and when they were written. Nine are older than they look. Three are a great deal newer.

The verdicts here are about age and origin rather than wording:

• True — the idea is old, and the source says roughly what the modern version says.
• Partly true — the idea is old, but the famous sentence is not, or has lost part of what it said.
• Myth — sold as ancient, or credited to the wrong person, and the source does not bear it out.

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Part one: older than you think

“The obstacle is the way.”

Partly true The thought is Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.20. The sentence is modern: its punch comes from a 2002 translation, and the three-word slogan is shorter still.

Gregory Hays’s translation, published by the Modern Library in 2002, gives the end of the passage as “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” That is Hays’s English. George Long’s translation of the same passage, first published in 1862, ends: “and that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road.” Same idea, far less quotable.

Marcus wrote in Greek. When a line from him sounds like a slogan, the slogan is often the translator’s.

Journaling

True The Meditations is, in the words of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “a personal notebook, written by Marcus to himself and for his own use”. The same encyclopedia says it was probably written while he was on campaign in central Europe, around AD 171–175.

The Greek title it goes by, ta eis heauton, means “to himself”. The encyclopedia adds that this title may be a later addition; it is first recorded around 900, by the bishop Arethas.

So a book people now read as practical philosophy began as a man writing notes to himself. That is a reassuring thing to know if your own journal repeats itself.

“Curate your feed. Your environment shapes you.”

True Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 7, “On crowds”, in Richard Mott Gummere’s translation:

“To consort with the crowd is harmful; there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith. Certainly, the greater the mob with which we mingle, the greater the danger. But nothing is so damaging to good character as the habit of lounging at the games; for then it is that vice steals subtly upon one through the avenue of pleasure.”

He goes on to say that he comes home “more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman”, and describes a midday show at the arena. The mechanism he names, that the harm arrives through pleasure, which is why you do not notice it, is the same argument people make today for a digital detox.

“You don’t have a time problem, you have a priorities problem.”

True Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, chapter 1, in John W. Basore’s translation: “It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough”.

The essay is addressed to Paulinus, who was in charge of Rome’s grain supply, and much of it is about people who are busy with everything except their own lives: “There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living”.

“Rock bottom built me.”

Partly true Seneca, De Providentia 5.9: ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros, “fire tests gold; misfortune, brave men.”

One thing the modern version drops. Our reading: in the Latin, the fire tests the gold; it does not make it. Seneca is talking about what hardship shows about a character, and he says the good man must steer his own course through it. He does not promise that any disaster will improve you.

“If you can fix it, don’t worry. If you can’t, worrying won’t help.”

True It is Shantideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra 6.10, by a Buddhist monk who lived between the late 7th and mid-8th century. In the Padmakara Translation Group’s English (2006):

“If there’s a remedy when trouble strikes, / What reason is there for dejection? / And if there is no help for it, / What use is there in being glum?”

The argument in the original is the one people repeat. We follow the names this line gets shared under in Did They Really Say That?

“Memento mori.”

Partly true A few ancient writers describe the reminder, but the famous two-word tag is not in the passage usually cited for it, and the historian Mary Beard, in The Roman Triumph (2007), questions how good the evidence for the custom is.

The passage usually cited is Tertullian’s Apologeticus 33. He is arguing that the emperor is a man, not a god, and says that even in a triumph, riding in the chariot, the emperor is prompted from behind: “Respice post te! Hominem te memento!” In S. Thelwall’s translation: “Look behind thee; remember thou art but a man.” Tertullian does not say who speaks.

He is not the only writer to mention the reminder. Epictetus, in the Discourses recorded by his pupil Arrian, refers to “those who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal”. And Zonaras, in a passage printed among the fragments of Cassius Dio’s Roman History, says a public slave rode in the chariot holding the crown and “kept saying to him, ‘Look behind!’”

The two-word tag memento mori is not in Tertullian’s Latin: his words are hominem te memento, “remember you are a man”.

The Stoic habit of keeping death in view is well documented in its own right. Epictetus, Enchiridion 21: “Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly”.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Myth as Theodore Roosevelt, but the point is ancient. Quote Investigator “has located no substantive evidence supporting ascriptions to Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and C. S. Lewis”. The earliest match it found using “comparison” and “thief of joy” is from 2003, and in 2004 the familiar wording was in print credited to nobody in particular (“Somebody once said…”). The names came afterwards: Dwight Edwards in 2010, C. S. Lewis in 2011, Roosevelt in 2012, and a variant pinned on Mark Twain in 2013. Roosevelt died in 1919.

The underlying thought is old. In Letters 2, Seneca quotes Epicurus, “Contented poverty is an honourable estate”, and then adds his own gloss: “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” A different angle on the same problem: the trouble lies in the wanting, not in what you have.

“Live every day as if it were your last.”

Partly true Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.69, and the sentence has a condition attached that the motivational version leaves out. In Long’s translation: “The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.”

The condition points toward calm rather than urgency. The half that gets quoted can read as a case for frantic living; the half that gets left out rules that out.

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Part two: newer than you think

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Myth as Aristotle. It is Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1926: a popular history of philosophy, summarising Aristotle.

It is a good summary. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Aristotle argues that “by doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave actions brave” (Everyman translation, on Project Gutenberg).

So the thought is Aristotle’s and the famous sentence is Durant’s.

The ikigai Venn diagram

Myth The four-circle diagram (what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for) is not Japanese and not ancient. It was published on 14 May 2014 by Marc Winn, a blogger in Guernsey.

In a note added to that post he writes: “The diagram is not mine. It began as a purpose venn diagram by the Spanish astrologer Andrés Zuzunaga”. Zuzunaga, commenting on the same post, dated his Spanish graphic to 2012. Winn says he had come across the word ikigai in Dan Buettner’s work on the Blue Zones.

Winn has since written about the gap himself: “The Japanese idea of ikigai is not a career-planning tool. It doesn’t require your work, your gift and the world’s needs to line up in one paid role.” In Japan, he adds, it is often “something small and domestic, a morning walk, a grandchild, a garden”. A Japanese dictionary, the Digital Daijisen, defines the word as 生きるに値するもの, “something worth living for”.

“Amor fati” as a Stoic phrase

Myth The phrase amor fati is Nietzsche’s. The phrase appears in The Gay Science, section 276 (1882). In Thomas Common’s translation: “I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:—I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love!” He returns to it in Ecce Homo, written in late 1888 (Anthony M. Ludovici’s translation): “My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: the fact that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, or for all eternity.”

The Stoics did teach accepting what you cannot control, and Marcus Aurelius went further: “Love that only which happens to thee and is spun with the thread of thy destiny” (Meditations 7.57, Long). So the mix-up is understandable. Epictetus, Enchiridion 8: “Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”

Nietzsche made the phrase a formula of his own. In the same Ecce Homo passage: “Not only must the necessary be borne, and on no account concealed,—all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity,—but it must also be loved.” And he criticised the Stoics directly, in Beyond Good and Evil §9: “You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words!”

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Why any of this matters

There is a practical reason to know how old a piece of advice is.

An idea that is two thousand years old has had a long testing. Generation after generation could have dropped it and did not. That is not proof it is true, but it is evidence of a kind, the same kind you get from a building that is still standing.

An idea from 2014 has had less time. It may be excellent, and the ikigai diagram is a reasonable career exercise. It is one person’s adaptation, though, and it helps to weigh it as that rather than as the accumulated wisdom of Okinawa.

The advice is rarely the problem. The costume is.

How to date one yourself

• Search the exact phrase and sort by oldest. Google Books is the quickest tool here. If the earliest hit is recent, the Roman label is doubtful.
• Search the ancient work itself. The Meditations, Seneca’s letters and essays, the Nicomachean Ethics and most of the other old texts on this page are free to read on Project Gutenberg and Wikisource, in older translations. If the line is there, it takes seconds to find. If it is not, that tells you something too.
• Check which translation. A punchy English sentence from an ancient text is often the translator’s punch, not the author’s. Compare two translations and see what survives both.
• Be careful with diagrams. A neat chart with an ancient name on it is worth tracing like any quotation.

And the last word belongs to Ecclesiastes 1:9: “there is no new thing under the sun.” The observation that nothing is new is not new either.

Sources

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.20, 7.57 and 7.69, trans. George Long (first edition 1862; Project Gutenberg and Wikisource); Gregory Hays’s translation (Modern Library, 2002), as quoted and identified in Donald Robertson’s review of The Obstacle Is the Way (2017).
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Marcus Aurelius”.
• Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 2 and 7, trans. Richard Mott Gummere (Wikisource); On the Shortness of Life 1, 7 and 18, trans. John W. Basore (Wikisource), with the Latin from The Latin Library; De Providentia 5.9 (The Latin Library).
• Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra 6.10, in the Padmakara translation (2006), via the Tsadra Foundation’s Bodhicitta verse pages; dates from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Śāntideva”.
• Tertullian, Apologeticus 33 (Latin, The Latin Library; trans. S. Thelwall, tertullian.org); Epictetus, Discourses 3.24, trans. George Long (Wikisource); Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 6 fragments with Zonaras’s summary, Loeb translation (LacusCurtius); Epictetus, Enchiridion 8 and 21, trans. T. W. Higginson (Project Gutenberg).
• Quote Investigator, “Comparison Is the Thief of Joy” (2021).
• Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926), Aristotle chapter (Internet Archive); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.1 (Everyman translation, Project Gutenberg).
• Marc Winn, “What is your Ikigai?” (14 May 2014, with a later note and reader comments) and his Ikigai pillar page, The View Inside Me; Digital Daijisen, 生き甲斐, via Kotobank.
• Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (2007), as summarised in Wolfgang Blösel’s review, sehepunkte 8 (2008), no. 10.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science §276, trans. Thomas Common; Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever” §10, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici; Beyond Good and Evil §9, trans. Helen Zimmern (all Project Gutenberg); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Life and Works”, for dates.
• Ecclesiastes 1:9, King James Version (Project Gutenberg).

Checked September 2026. If you can date any of these earlier than we have, with a source, we would like to see it: hacksvitae@gmail.com

Related: Did They Really Say That? 22 famous quotes, checked against the source · Stoicism, plainly explained · Carpe diem: what Horace actually wrote