I realize this was a personal journal of sorts and not intended to be published––but it was published. And so as a published work, I struggled with two things: the massive redundancy in the journal entries (the introduction warned of such) and the translation. Redundancy: Read one chapter, you’ve got the gist of all of them. Same themes are on repeat: be good, stop sucking Marcus, death is inevitable and not to be feared. Translation: so “modern” that the content felt violated and interpreted in a much too heavy-handed way. I gained more from the introduction that gave me a refresher on Stoicism; I failed to connect with the text itself.