A man came to me furious. He had done everything correctly — studied diligently, worked hard, treated people fairly, built a good reputation. And yet things had not gone as he expected. He wanted to know why.
"Everything I did was right," he said.
"Right for what?" I asked.
He looked at me as though I had gone soft.
Aurelius would ask the same question more seriously: what is the purpose of a good action? The Stoics care enormously about this. Is virtue its own reward? Is it an input to something larger? The man who does right in order to prosper has a different relationship to setback than the man who does right because doing right is who he is.
The fool's observation is simpler: most people are right about the right things in the wrong order. They are right about the value of hard work but wrong about what work is for. They are right that integrity matters but wrong about which of their habits are actually failures of integrity.
The examined life is not about finding more reasons to do what you are already doing. It is about asking whether the thing you are doing so correctly is the thing that actually needed doing.
The man went away irritated. This is usually what it feels like to have received useful information.