Anna Katharina Schaffner is professor of cultural history at the University of Kent.
She is the author of Exhaustion: A History and the novel The Truth about Julia.
Her latest book is The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths.
At the Guardian Schaffner tagged ten of the best guides to making a better life, including:
Meditations by Marcus AureliusRead about the other entries on the list.
The Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180) believed that all suffering is in our minds. Suffering is caused not by external events but by our reactions to those events – by faulty judgments and unrealistic expectations. Given that most external events are beyond our control, Aurelius argues in his Meditations that it is pointless to worry about them. Our evaluations of these events, by contrast, are completely within our control. It follows that all our mental energies should be directed inwards, with a view to controlling our minds. The key to a happy life, then, lies in adjusting our expectations, because “only a madman looks for figs in winter”.
The Meditations is among five books that changed Elizabeth Gilbert.
--Marshal Zeringue
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