Practice Really Hearing- Marcus Aurelius, My Father, and Learning to Shut Up
I came across a line I highlighted in Meditations the other day that stopped me cold: “Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds.” It’s a simple sentence. Marcus Aurelius wrote it nearly two thousand years ago, probably late at night, probably exhausted from running an empire and fighting wars on the frontier. And the thing that hit me wasn’t the wisdom of it. It was the effort in it. This wasn’t a man describing something that came naturally. This was a man reminding himself to do something he kept failing at.
I know that feeling.
I have ADHD. I was diagnosed at 34, which means I spent over three decades building neurological habits that are, to put it charitably, not optimized for sustained attention to other people’s words. My brain is wired to make connections — fast, lateral, associative. Someone shares something, and before they’ve finished their sentence, my mind has already linked it to three things I want to say, two things I’ve read, and something that happened to me last Tuesday. The impulse to share all of that feels, from the inside, like connection. Like I’m saying I hear you, and look, we have this in common.
From the outside, apparently, it looks like I’m making everything about myself.
I learned this again the other night. My brother-in-law announced in our family group chat that he’d landed a new job — a real career move. I was genuinely happy for him. I said so. Thumbs up, “Hell yeah.” And then, within a few messages, I’d pivoted to my own career news. The requisition I’m waiting on. The seminar I’m giving. The frustrations with my current team. By the time the conversation ended, I’d turned his moment into my stage.
Nobody asked me a follow-up question. That’s always the signal.
Simone Weil wrote that attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Not the kind of attention where you’re formulating your response while someone talks. Not the kind where you’re scanning for a connection point so you can relate. She meant something closer to surrender — being fully present to another person’s reality without inserting yourself into it. She compared it to prayer, but you don’t need the theology to feel the weight of it. Genuine attention means setting your own movie aside and watching someone else’s.
For most people, this might be a matter of politeness or social skill. For me, it’s closer to a discipline — something that requires real cognitive resources, the kind of sustained effort that doesn’t come free. I’ve started thinking of it through the lens of what I call the “flourishing as a luxury” thesis: the idea that higher human pursuits — contemplation, eudaimonia, intellectual life — require a material foundation. You can’t philosophize on an empty stomach. Aristotle knew this. Maslow formalized it. What I’ve been working through lately is whether relational skills like deep listening belong in that category too. Whether genuine attention is itself a luxury good — something that demands neurological and emotional resources that aren’t equally distributed.
For someone with an ADHD brain, listening well isn’t a baseline social expectation you’re failing to meet. It’s an achievement. And the gap between how it’s experienced internally and how it’s evaluated externally — that gap is where a lot of quiet shame lives.
Here’s what I didn’t expect from the group chat incident: grief.
My father died thirteen years ago. In the ordinary course of things, that loss has settled into something manageable — a low hum rather than a sharp note. But the other night, as I traveled the path from excitement for my brother-in-law, to excitement about my own news, to the slow recognition that I’d done the thing again, I ended up somewhere I wasn’t prepared to go. I thought about my dad.
He didn’t understand what I do for a living. Most people in my life don’t — I work in healthcare data analytics, building ETL pipelines and BI dashboards, and if your eyes just glazed over, congratulations, you now understand what every holiday dinner is like. But my father would listen anyway. He’d ask questions. Not sophisticated questions, not questions that proved he tracked every technical detail. Just questions that proved he cared. He practiced what Weil describes as attention-as-generosity without ever having heard of her, without any philosophical framework at all. He just showed up.
This isn’t to say nobody listens. My wife cares enough to call me out when I’m doing it again — and that’s its own kind of generosity, even when it stings. Family members show up in their own ways. But my father had a specific quality of attention that I didn’t have to earn or explain. It was just there — effortless, patient, unconditional. And losing that changed the way every smaller conversational frustration lands. The sting of being told I’m “steamrolling again” isn’t just social correction. It echoes in a space that’s been empty for thirteen years.
This is why Marcus Aurelius feels like a kindred spirit, and why I don’t think that’s as pretentious as it sounds.
The Meditations weren’t written for publication. They were private journal entries — a man talking to himself because there was nobody else to have the conversation with. The tutors and mentors he thanks in Book 1 — Rusticus, Apollonius, Sextus — were long gone by the time he was writing most of the journal. He was surrounded by people who needed things from him. Senators who needed decisions. Generals who needed orders. A whole empire that needed its emperor. But his philosophical life, the inner work of trying to be a decent human being in an indecent world, was conducted essentially alone, in a notebook, at the end of the day.
“Practice really hearing what people say.” That’s not the serene observation of a sage. That’s a note-to-self from a man who kept catching himself not doing it. His mind was elsewhere — on the campaign, on the next decision, on the ideas cycling through his head. Sound familiar?
I’m not comparing myself to a Roman emperor. The stakes are, to put it mildly, different. But the structure of the problem is the same: a fast-moving mind, a deficit of people who engage at the level you’re operating on, and the daily, unglamorous work of trying to actually hear the people in front of you instead of retreating into your own interior life.
Epictetus, the teacher Marcus drew from most heavily, used to berate his students for wanting to perform philosophy rather than practice it. They’d show up eager to demonstrate what they’d learned, to impress, to connect through displays of knowledge. Epictetus saw this for what it was: the ego wearing wisdom as a costume. Real philosophical practice, for him, started with listening — with receiving before transmitting.
I recognize that pattern in myself more than I’d like to admit. The oversharing that feels like connection is, at least partly, performance. Not in a cynical way — I’m not trying to show off. But there’s an Epictetan critique lurking: when I leap to share my own parallel experience, I’m choosing the role of speaker over the role of student. I’m depositing my experience into the conversation rather than letting it become what Paulo Freire would call dialogue — a genuine exchange where both people are simultaneously teaching and learning.
Freire’s critique of “banking” education maps onto this more than you’d expect. In the banking model, one person has the knowledge and deposits it into another. The receiver is passive. There’s no real exchange. When I steamroll a conversation, I’m running a one-way deposit. Even when my intent is connection, the structure is monologue.
So what now?
I’ve started meditating. Not in any dramatic way — just a few minutes with a timer, practicing the skill of noticing a thought without chasing it. The goal isn’t silence. The goal is the gap: that tiny space between the impulse to speak and the act of speaking, between the stimulus and the response. Stoics call this the “discipline of assent.” Buddhists call it mindfulness. A therapist might call it executive function training. Whatever label you put on it, it’s the same muscle.
And I’ve been reading Rebecca Shafir’s The Zen of Listening, which reframes listening not as a set of active-listening tricks — nod here, paraphrase there — but as a genuine practice of presence. Her “movie mindset” idea resonates: approach a conversation the way you watch a film, entering someone else’s experience without the urge to direct it. That’s what my father did on his better days, without knowing there was a name for it. That’s what Weil describes philosophically. That’s what Marcus was journaling himself into.
I’m not good at it yet. I might never be great at it. My brain will keep generating connections faster than conversations can absorb them, and the impulse to share will keep firing. But I’m starting to understand the difference between learning to listen because I’ve been scolded into it and learning to listen because I’ve chosen it as a practice. The first is compliance. The second is something closer to what Marcus was after — a discipline you pursue because you’ve seen what it makes possible, even when you fail at it regularly.
The group chat will happen again. I’ll get excited. I’ll overshare. Someone will let me know, gently or otherwise. And I’ll feel the old sting, and maybe the old grief underneath it. But there’s something almost Sisyphean about this that I’ve come to appreciate. Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy — that the struggle itself is enough, that meaning lives in the act of pushing the boulder even knowing it will roll back down. Learning to listen with an ADHD brain is its own boulder. I’ll push it up the hill tomorrow, and it will roll back, and I’ll push it again. Not because I’ll ever reach the summit, but because the pushing is the point. It’s the same defiant choice I try to make everywhere else: to keep showing up for the struggle rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
And I’m trying to pass it forward. My daughter is four. She never met my father — missed him by almost a decade. I really wish she could have. But I can give her what he gave me: the experience of being listened to by someone who might not fully understand what she’s saying but who shows up anyway. Who asks the questions. Who puts his own movie on pause and watches hers. Some days I’m better at it than others. Most days, honestly, I’m still learning.
But I’ll also have this: the knowledge that a Roman emperor — the most powerful man in the Western world — sat in his tent at night and wrote himself the same reminder I need. Practice really hearing what people say. Not because he was wise, but because he was trying to be. And that a man who never read a word of philosophy in his life — my father — managed to practice something close to Simone Weil’s deepest insight without knowing it had a name: that paying attention to someone is the most generous thing you can do. He wasn’t perfect at it. Nobody is. But he tried, and I felt it.
My father practiced it imperfectly but consistently. Marcus practiced it deliberately. I’m somewhere in between — learning the discipline version of something I once received as a gift, trying to give it to a little girl who never met the man who gave it to me.
I imagine Marcus would understand.
Sources & Further Reading
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Gregory Hays translation recommended)
- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
- Epictetus, Discourses
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- Rebecca Shafir, The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction
- Nolen Gertz, Nihilism