Stop Wasting Life on Other People's Business
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Μὴ κατατρίψῃς τὸ ὑπολειπόμενον τοῦ βίου μέρος ἐν ταῖς περὶ ἑτέρων φαντασίαις, ὁπόταν μὴ τὴν ἀναφορὰν ἐπί τι κοινωφελὲς ποιῇ ( ἤτοι γὰρ ἄλλου ἔργου στέρῃ). τουτέστι φανταζόμενος τί ὁ δεῖνα πράσσει καὶ τίνος ἕνεκεν καὶ τί λέγει καὶ τί ἐνθυμεῖται καὶ τί τεχνάζεται καὶ ὅσα τοιαῦτα ποιεῖ ἀπορρέμβεσθαι τῆς τοῦ ἰδίου ἡγεμονικοῦ παρατηρήσεως.
Do not spend what remains of your life on fantasies about other people — not unless what you are picturing serves the common good; otherwise you are robbing yourself of other, better work. I mean: imagining what so-and-so is doing, and why, what he is saying, what he has in mind, what he is scheming, and everything else of that kind — such imagining pulls you away from watching over your own ruling faculty.
Marcus warns himself against burning what remains of his life imagining what unnamed others are doing, saying, and scheming, since such curiosity — unless it serves some common good — only distracts him from watching over his own ruling faculty.
This aphorism opens Meditations 3.4 with a warning about attrition: κατατρίψῃς means literally to grind or rub away, the same violence English keeps in "attrition," and it casts an idle life spent guessing at other people's business as a slow wearing-down of a finite stock — τὸ ὑπολειπόμενον, "what is left." The qualification that follows is easy to miss: Marcus does not forbid attention to others outright, only attention that makes no ἀναφορά, no reference, to something κοινωφελές, of common benefit. Interest in other people is permitted; interest detached from any use to the community is what wastes the remainder of a life.
The second sentence unpacks what such waste looks like in practice: a checklist of πράσσει, λέγει, ἐνθυμεῖται, τεχνάζεται — what so-and-so does, says, thinks, and contrives — a small parody of the effort gossip actually requires. The verb that names the cost, ἀπορρέμβεσθαι, pictures the mind not merely idling but wandering off its post, away from παρατήρησις, the watch it owes its own ἡγεμονικόν. The image recurs across Book 3 and sharpens the alarm of 3.1: time is short, and every hour spent narrating an unnamed δεῖνα's affairs is an hour the ruling faculty went unguarded.
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