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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

You think Marcus Aurelius was unable to affect other peoples' actions? That's not the idea. The point is that you can't directly make someone else think or feel a certain way, only act on them externally.

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If causality holds, acting externally will have changes to internal assessments assuming good faith dialogue. Plus Marcus Aurelius was helpless in that it would take him lot of time and energy to give personal attention to each individual and clarify their doubts. He didn't have the technology to record his thoughts on a topic and refer people to it.

> He didn't have the technology to record his thoughts on a topic and refer people to it.

He did and we’re still reading them to this day.

I could be wrong in this. But wasn't his writings only for himself and was published only later. How many people really referred to his writings? When was printing press invented? How popular was it compared to Bible? Was it possible for people to consume his writings in multimedia formats like video, audio? Were there meme-pages on tiktoks which contextualized his writings in different day-to-day scenarios so that the importance of his general ideas were imprinted on their minds? Did he have debate with others to defend his ideas watched by many, how would he respond to those counter-arguments? Would your mind change considering if his responses weren't that strong or on filmsy grounds?

> Were there meme-pages on tiktoks which contextualized his writings in different day-to-day scenarios so that the importance of his general ideas were imprinted on their minds?

I honestly cannot tell whether this is satire or if I just don’t want to be on this planet anymore.

I hope it's satire. It would be quite limiting to believe that people can only learn things from short format video

Marcus Aurelis wrote in short snippets format. They were notes to himself which were latter organized into flowing organized essays by historians and writers.

Meme-pages are today's "brevity is the soul of wit". They really distill experience and wisdom in nice consumable package.

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