Open a newspaper this week and the headlines look unprecedented. AI is reshaping the job market. Screen time is collapsing attention. Rent is climbing in most major cities. Climate news. A piece of geopolitics making the inbox feel heavier than usual.
By any reasonable measure, our information environment looks like nothing in human history. By the next reasonable measure — the shape of the worry sitting on a person’s chest at 6 a.m. — almost nothing has changed.
I went through a stretch in my early thirties reading the Stoics fairly seriously. The book I came back to most was Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which he wrote in his own hand, in Greek, as a kind of private journal, around 2,000 years ago. He was the emperor of Rome. He commanded an army. He had every conceivable advantage that the ancient world could offer one human being. And here is how he opens Book 2 — a passage he wrote, by his own note, on what we can assume was a difficult morning:
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”
That is the inner monologue of a man preparing to deal with his people. Two thousand years ago. He is also, in the same book, worrying about his concentration (“Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee?“), about the inner life of strangers, about how he uses his time, about death. He is, in essence, having most of the same sort morning that I think many an ordinary person in any city in the world is having today.
Gallup’s recent global tracking, surveying 144 countries and territories, found that 39% of adults said they had worried a lot the previous day, and 37% said they had felt stressed. The numbers are down slightly from pandemic peaks, but worry, in particular, is five points higher than it was in 2014 and almost 10 points higher than it was in 2006. Around forty out of every hundred adults, on a given day, are walking around with a meaningful weight on them.
Ask any of those forty people about their worry and their answers will probably sound modern — a deadline, a child’s school, a bill, a message they shouldn’t have sent, a slow creep about the next ten years of work. The contents are 2026. The shape underneath — a person worried about getting through their day, about being seen well by other people, about money, about time running out — is not 2026. It is permanent.
The mistake I used to make, reading the Stoics, was assuming the relevance came from the historical distance. The idea I had was: look how wise these old men were; we should listen. The actual lesson might be the opposite direction. The relevance comes from the lack of distance. The man writing those passages was not wiser than us by an order of magnitude. He had the same worries we have, and he was, on a private page, working through them in real time, in the same way a person today might think them through on a long walk or in the margin of a notebook.
The setting around him has been replaced. Roman administration is gone. The horse-and-letter pace is gone. He never met a smartphone. But the worries he was working through — what people think of him, how to deal with difficult colleagues, what death means, how to use the time he has — are exactly the worries a thoughtful person in 2026 still works through. Some of them he gets right and some he gets wrong, by our lights. The point is that he is recognizable.
What changes generation to generation is the surface. The texture of the inputs. The names of the things to worry about. What does not change is the underlying machinery — the same animal, with the same nervous system, navigating roughly the same set of problems with roughly the same set of tools.
The practical use of all this is something like a calibration check. When the noise of the current moment feels uniquely heavy — which it does, in 2026, for a lot of people — it helps to remember that the heaviness is not actually a new condition. People have been carrying a roughly similar weight for a long time. Marcus Aurelius was carrying it. The neighbor you cannot stand was carrying it. The Stoics put names to it, the Buddhists put different names to it, every generation finds the words again because every generation has to.
None of this makes the modern version trivial. AI is real. Attention erosion is real. The cost-of-living squeeze is real. But the temptation to treat them as evidence that humans have never had it this hard is, on inspection, not quite right. The humans haven’t moved. The set has been redressed. The play is the same one.
Marcus closed Book 2 by reminding himself that the time of human life is “a point” and the substance “in a flux.” Then he went out and did his day. That part hasn’t changed either.
