O vain attempt!

Like the raison d’étre for the philosophical labor of both Seneca and Epictetus, Marcus’s Meditations are an attempt to slake a certain kind of existential thirst—the thirst to be in the world in a pattern of happiness and healing, to deal with the damage brought to our door by our own action and by the far less scrutable workings of the wider world. And like both Seneca and Epictetus, Marcus knows that to slake this thirst is to be disciplined by a particular pattern of a thinking.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 81–82