At the beginning of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius laments the kind of people he’s going to meet each day—the bitter, the stupid, the jealous, the petty. Throughout the book he mentions other undesirables—the shameless, the evil, the greedy, the ignorant, the manipulative. Today, we could add still others— racists, polluters, rage profiteers, trolls and on and on.

These people are frustrating. They make the world less safe, less productive, less collaborative. They poison the common good. They destroy any semblance of common understanding or commonality, period.

But instead of getting angry at them, try pity first.

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