What kind of person do I want to be in the world?
It’s a question I keep returning to. I’ve asked it of my kids as they’ve navigated friendships and decisions about school and work. I ask it of my clients as they wrestle with big choices and relational messiness. And I ask it of myself, as a husband, a dad, a therapist, and a friend.
And every so often, the world gives me an unexpected moment that shows me the answer far more honestly than my intentions do.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “There is but one thing of real value—to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.” I’ve been sitting with that line lately. I used to read it as the usual Stoic advice to stay calm and detached. But lately I’m hearing something else in it, something deeper that I’d overlooked.
It’s not about being detached from the world or staying unbothered and uninvolved. It’s about stepping into the world as the kind of person who can respond with something other than the anger, selfishness, mendacity, and corruption that surrounds us.
Years ago, I was in Portland for work. At the end of the day I left my client’s office and was walking toward Powell’s Books while on a conference call.
Across the street, a young woman came out of a building with a guy chasing right behind her, yelling. My colleague could hear the shouting and said, “Uh… what’s going on over there?”
I told him to hang on and stepped off the curb. I didn’t have a plan, I just sort of moved toward the conflict in case things got ugly and the young woman needed some help.
Then another guy came out of the building, jumped into the argument, and the two of them began pushing each other.
Nobody noticed me approaching.
Then the first kid grabbed his skateboard and swung it at the other guy’s head. Thankfully the second kid blocked it with his forearm.
By this time I was right next to them.
Instinctively I reached out and grabbed the skateboard, but I didn’t yank it out of his hands completely.
As I wrestled it from him, he spun around, let go of the skateboard, and punched me square in the face.
For a split second, I felt an old but familiar rage flare up, the one that used to get me into fights when I was younger.
But just as quickly as the anger arose, it fell away and dissipated into nothing.
It simply wasn’t in charge of my automatic response anymore.
We stood there, face to face.
Everything got quiet.
He looked shocked, probably because he hadn’t planned on punching a random thirty-something guy in a backpack who materialized out of nowhere.
He said something like, “Everyone’s ganging up on me!”
I heard myself respond, “No one’s ganging up on you. Just stop punching people in the face.”
He grabbed his skateboard and ran off.
The girl thanked me.
Then I walked back across the street and continued toward the bookstore.
My colleague said, “Did… did you just get in a fight?”
I had forgotten I was still on the call, and I said something like, “Not really, some kid just punched me and then ran off.”
It was a funny story at work for a long time, but internally, something changed for me. In that moment I had shown up differently than I used to. And in a way, it reintroduced me to a part of myself I’d lost contact with, the part that existed before the masks, and roles, and stories I'd learned to perform.
So when I return to that line about cultivating truth and justice without anger, I hear it differently. I don’t hear it as “never be angry”. I hear it as a warning about what happens when we tend to anger, when we feed it, rehearse it, and let it become a posture instead of a passing signal.
I don’t think anger is bad. Anger tells the truth about harm, about threat, about injustice. It’s a signal worth listening to.
But cultivated long enough, anger becomes something else. It becomes a posture, a way of being in the world. When frustration, anger, and cynicism become the pattern we default to, they reproduce the very harm we react against. More harm, more reactivity, more injustice.
I’ve always loved the way Richard Rohr puts it: “We become what we hate.”
Neither he, nor Marcus Aurelius are telling us to avoid anger.
They’re telling us not to practice it, not to be filled with it.
That day in Portland, my anger rose like it always had, but it didn’t guide or control me. Something deeper did. Compassion, maybe. Or clarity. Or a kind of moral muscle memory that had been strengthening in me over the years.
Whatever it was, it helped me see the kid in front of me not as an enemy, but as a human being caught in his own mess of fear, confusion, and bad choices. I have no idea what was going on with him or with the other people involved. I don’t know anything about his life. But I knew in that moment that what he needed wasn’t to get punched in the face.
That moment gave me a glimpse of who I was becoming, and the kind of person I can be in the world.
But not every moment is like that. There are plenty of times I don’t show up the way I want to. I blow it. I lose my temper when someone cuts me off. I respond sarcastically to my wife. I’m short with my kids.
Other times my anger flares at the world’s brokenness and then has nowhere to go. When that happens, when nothing changes, when nothing seems possible, the anger collapses inward. It turns into frustration, and then into a kind of numb resignation.
The older I get, the more I see the vastness of the world’s brokenness, the corruption, the suffering, the injustice that stretches far beyond anything I can fix. And when I start believing that my actions don’t matter, that the systemic problems are beyond anything we can hope to change, that’s when the slide into numbness begins. It’s that inner voice that says, What’s the point? Nothing will change.
When I notice that voice creeping in, I know I’ve lost the plot. I’ve forgotten that my choices do matter. They’re the one thing I actually have to offer. This is what each of us contributes in our own ways to the world we inhabit, to the systems we shape and are shaped by, to the stories we live in and pass on.
This is where systems thinking, and the Me-We-The framework I wrote about recently helps me. The world is complicated, layered, interconnected in ways we rarely see. And in complex systems, small acts create ripples we can’t predict or measure.
The Portland encounter didn’t change the world in any obvious way.
But it changed something.
It pressed pause in the middle of a violent moment.
It shifted the emotional trajectory of three young people.
And it shifted mine.
I’ll probably never see that kid again. I’ll never know what that moment meant in his story. But actions don’t need visibility to have significance.
This is my antidote to nihilism:
my moral effort matters not because it changes everything, but because it changes something. And in a complex world, we rarely know what our actions set in motion.
But I have to work to stay in that frame of mind. And it’s not just my own inner monologue that slides toward numbness. There’s also the cultural noise, the purity tests, the shifting orthodoxies, the quick turn from conversation to accusation that makes moral effort feel pointless, and even sort of dangerous.
“You’re worried about climate change? But don’t you still drive a car and use plastics?”
“You care about justice? You still buy things made unethically.”
”You have a different opinion about X? You’re obviously a horrible human being.”
As if our imperfection invalidates our effort.
As if change only counts when it’s pure and flawless.
That’s not how complex systems work.
And it’s not how human lives work either.
We don’t get to stand outside the systems we inhabit.
We’re embedded in them, shaped by them, participating in them, from family life to global economies.
The structures we live inside weren’t designed in a single moment. They emerged over years through countless decisions, incentives, pressures, mistakes, and interactions.
So of course our efforts aren’t pure.
How could they be?
We’re part of the very systems we’re trying to improve.
But that doesn’t make the effort meaningless.
If anything, it’s the reason our choices matter at all.
They become part of the ongoing emergence of what comes next.
We don’t have to be perfect to contribute to the good.
We just have to participate. Day by day, moment by moment, choice by choice.
And when we do, when we cultivate goodness instead of anger, we become a small but meaningful actor in whatever systems we’re part of.
We tilt the world a fraction in the direction of truth and justice. We create the possibility of a different outcome for the people around us. We become, in ways we’ll never fully see, a source of steadiness in a chaotic world.
I don’t tell the Portland story because I handled it perfectly, or because I imagine it changed some kid’s life. And I’m certainly not trying to say I’ve got it all figured out. I tell it because of what it revealed to me. I can take a small piece of the world’s pain, hold it for a moment, and transform it. I can interrupt a cycle instead of continuing it. I can create a pause in a situation that once would have gone very differently.
And if I can do it once, I can do it again. Moment by moment. Choice by choice.
In the end, that brings me back to the question I return to over and over again: What kind of person do I want to be in the world?
For me, I have to keep reminding myself that the person I am, the way I show up, actually does something in the larger world. My presence matters. My choices have consequences. They influence, for better or for worse, the people and systems around me in ways that aren’t usually obvious.
And maybe that’s what Marcus Aurelius was getting at.
Not to be disengaged and unbothered about the world’s injustice, but to remember that even in an imperfect world, especially in an imperfect world, the way I choose to show up matters. It always matters. Even when the effects remain unseen. Even when the ripples never make their way back to me.
Because in a complex, interconnected world, nothing is ever just personal.
And every moment is another chance to ask myself:
Who am I becoming?
How do I want to show up?
What kind of person do I want to be in the world?
Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858