The Unlived Life—Marcus Aurelius and Jung on Becoming Whole
Dying Every Day (Day 151)
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Dying Every Day is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project. Each episode turns a selected passage from Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation designed to help you (and me) learn how to live.
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The Unlived Life—Marcus Aurelius and Jung on Becoming Whole
Welcome to Dying Every Day. This is Day 151.
“Character: dark, unmanly, stubborn.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Three words. No context. No explanation.
Scholars have debated for centuries what Marcus meant by it, who he was describing, and why it sits there in the middle of his private journal without elaboration. But read it plainly, without the apparatus of interpretation, and the most natural reading could be that he is describing himself.
Not the emperor. Not the Stoic sage. Not the polished public figure who appears in statues and histories. The other one. The one underneath. The dark, the obstinate, the parts of his own character that did not fit the persona he was required to maintain before the Roman world every single day.
He wrote it down for himself. Three words in a private journal he never intended anyone to read.
The Meditations are usually read as the record of a man who had mastered his philosophy—reminders to himself to stay on the path he had already found. That reading is not wrong. But it is incomplete.
What Marcus does across these pages, again and again, is similar, not necessarily the same, to what Carl Jung would describe eighteen centuries later: looking directly at the parts of himself he would rather not see, naming them, and refusing to let them operate on him from the dark.
Here’s Jung:
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness.”
The shadow, in Jung’s sense, is not the evil within us—though that is the common misreading. It is the unknown within us. Everything that has been judged unacceptable, weak, shameful, or dangerous and pushed out of conscious awareness. Not eliminated. Pushed down—where it continues to accumulate, shape behavior, and influence every relationship and decision, without the person having any idea it is doing so.
And the less you look at it, Jung says, the denser and darker it becomes.
The shadow you acknowledge can be worked with. The shadow you refuse to see is the one that bursts forth suddenly, in a moment of unawareness, the disproportionate anger, the contempt that comes from nowhere, the reaction that surprises because you didn’t know it was there.
Marcus knew it was there.
That is what makes the Meditations remarkable.
He did not write from the assumption that he had conquered his darker impulses. He wrote from the daily awareness that he hadn’t—and that the only protection against being governed by them was to keep looking at them directly.
Notice how he catches his own craving for recognition:
“You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
He would not write this if he did not feel the craving. You do not warn yourself away from a desire you don’t have. This is Marcus catching his own vanity—the hunger for approval that did not fit the image of the self-sufficient Stoic and dragging it into the light, where it loses its power to operate unseen.
And here he is on the life he did not get to live:
“Just because you’ve abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Marcus had wanted to be a philosopher. He became an emperor instead—bound to duty, to war, to the endless administration of a collapsing world, with little time for the contemplative life he craved. This passage is his acknowledgment of the grief of the unlived life, the path not taken, the self he might have been.
This is the part of the shadow that Robert Johnson, a Jungian analyst and one of the most accessible interpreters of this tradition, understood better than most.
“Some of the pure gold of our personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great leveling process that is culture. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy, but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying.” — Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
The gold in the shadow. This is Johnson’s most important contribution—and the aspect of shadow work that the standard reading of Marcus entirely misses.
The shadow is not only what we have suppressed because it was dark. It is also what we have suppressed because it was too large, too bright, or too much of a departure from who we had decided to be. The capacities never developed.
The unlived life, which does not disappear when we abandon it but instead accumulates in the dark, demanding attention in ways that become harder to ignore.
Here is one of the more popular passages from Marcus:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly... But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.”
The wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.
It is tempting to hear that as a confession—what I despise in them, I carry too. But that is not quite what Marcus means. He is invoking Stoic cosmology, the conviction that all rational beings share one divine reason, that we are kin, parts of a single whole. His point is an argument against anger: I owe the wrongdoer patience rather than contempt, because we share a nature, and he errs through ignorance of the good rather than malice.
That is a different road than the one Jung traveled. But it arrives somewhere close. The refusal to split the world into the good self and the bad others, to pretend the line between them is clean, does the work that shadow integration does, even though Marcus reached it through the cosmos rather than the unconscious.
Two traditions, both refusing the one comfort everyone wants: the comfort of believing the darkness is only ever in someone else.
Daily Practice
Today’s daily exercise has three movements:
Recognition. Identify one trait in someone else that triggers an outsized reaction in you. It’s not just mild dislike but something that truly irritates, repels, or unsettles. Then, consider Marcus’ question: “Where does this exist within me as well?” Approach this not as self-criticism but as genuine investigation. Your intense response offers a clue, indicating something you hold but have chosen to ignore.
The dark. Sit with whatever surfaces. Don’t dismiss it, don’t justify it, don’t rush to fix it. Simply let it be seen. The shadow loses power in direct proportion to how clearly it is seen. Name it, as Marcus named his own character in three words.
The gold. Now, the harder question—the one Johnson says people resist most. What unlived capacity, what suppressed quality, what abandoned possibility has been waiting in the dark? Not what is wrong with you, but what is unexpressed in you. What would you be if you allowed yourself to be more than you have permitted so far?
Finally, it’s important to remember that the Stoics held that virtue was the sole good, yet they also acknowledged that striving for virtue doesn't entirely eliminate vice. Marcus cultivated awareness by observing, recognizing, and admitting his vice daily—and you can do the same.
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. Catch up on recent (and past) meditations in the archive!