What Marcus Aurelius, Shiva, and stoicism understood about the human mind

In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs recalled reading a line when he was young: if one lived each day as if it were the last, eventually one would be right. Over time, he said, remembering death became one of his most important decision-making tools. Fear of embarrassment, failure, and external judgment lost much of its grip when measured against the reality that life itself was temporary.

Death, as every human being’s eventual destination, appears obvious. Yet rather than allowing this awareness to sharpen priorities, most people bury themselves in distraction, vanity, comparison, and endless trivial pursuits. Entire years disappear in social performance, anxiety, invisible rivalries, and the pursuit of symbols mistaken for meaning. Life itself quietly becomes postponed — reduced to waiting for some future milestone or moment of validation instead of something consciously lived. 

The problem is not ambition itself. Human beings are meant to strive, build, create, and pursue excellence. There is dignity in hard work, achievement, and mastery. Ambition begins to curdle when it becomes untethered from character and virtue — when externally manufactured reputation becomes more important than genuine self-worth, performative success more important than fulfilment earned through disciplined effort and meaningful pursuit, and outward appearance more important than physical vitality and health. Much of modern life becomes consumed by symbols, vanity, and performative self-presentation while forgetting that every human being eventually arrives at the same end.

This idea appears clearly in the Stoic writings of Marcus Aurelius. Despite ruling the vast Roman Empire, Aurelius constantly reminded himself of the temporary nature of power, wealth, and reputation. In Meditations, he writes, “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” For the Stoics, Memento Mori — remember that you will die — was not a morbid fixation on death, but a discipline of clarity reminding human beings that time is too limited to be consumed entirely by vanity, social performance, and symbolic living.

Ancient Indian thought approached the same psychological problem through the idea of Manas — the faculty of mind that allows human beings not merely to experience reality but to imagine, fear, desire, and multiply suffering. Human beings can relive humiliation for years, fear failures before they arrive, and become consumed by imagined futures that may never occur. The same mental faculty that enables civilisation, art, and ambition can also trap people in cycles of vanity and endless dissatisfaction. In one symbolic Puranic story, Brahma becomes obsessively attached to Shatarupa, while Shiva, manifesting as Rudra, severs one of Brahma’s heads — not as punishment for desire itself, but as a warning against desire that has lost all relationship to restraint, proportion, and reality.

Modern life intensifies this condition. Human desire today is constantly stimulated, amplified, and commercialised through social media, advertising, buy-now-pay-later consumerism, and distractions designed to keep attention restless and appetite permanently unsatisfied. People are encouraged not merely to possess more but to constantly compare, display, consume, and seek validation through curated digital identities. Contemporary writers like Mark Manson describe this as a “hedonic treadmill” —
a cycle in which temporary pleasures quickly fade into normality. In contrast, pursuits whose meaning deepens through repetition rather than consumption — whether reading, philosophy, artistic expression, meaningful work, or physical discipline — tend to sharpen the mind and deepen human sensitivity. Without such anchors, individuals gradually become trapped in cycles of compulsion, shallow performance, external approval, and restless dissatisfaction. Much of modern anxiety emerges from this contradiction: people seek mastery over the world
while remaining unable to govern their own minds.

Awareness of mortality ultimately forces prioritisation — towards character over vanity, meaningful work over hollow performance, and genuine fulfilment over endless accumulation and approval. In the end, it compels human beings to confront a deeper question: what is truly worth devoting oneself to?

That clarity is perhaps best illustrated not by any philosopher but by Bhagat Singh. Popular memory often reduces him merely to revolutionary symbolism, yet Singh was deeply intellectual. In prison, awaiting execution, he read voraciously — Marx, Russell, Hugo, and Dostoevsky. His fearlessness was not the recklessness of someone indifferent to consequences but the composure of someone who had already decided what mattered. Once anchored in purpose rather than vanity or comfort, even hardship and suffering become smaller concerns, and fear begins to lose much of its grip. His 116-day hunger strike was not despair but a disciplined protest rooted in dignity, self-respect, and an unwillingness to compromise moral seriousness even under extreme suffering. And so when death finally came for him, he did not meet it as a man desperately clinging to life but as someone who had already lived with such intensity of purpose that death itself could no longer intimidate him — echoing the words of Mark Twain: “A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

To remember mortality properly is not to become obsessed with endings but more attentive to the present — to work worth doing for its own meaning, conversations worth having, books worth reading, friendships worth preserving, and ordinary days that quietly constitute an entire life.

Most people spend their lives preparing to finally live someday. The more uncomfortable question is: what if this was the life itself?

(The author works across international finance and strategy projects and writes on philosophy, leadership, capital markets, and geopolitics)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH).