Is a five-year goal un-Stoic?

No. It can orient action while remaining conditional on many causes beyond one person.

How do I avoid changing plans every day?

Use a fixed review interval and revise for new evidence, resources or duties, not every passing mood.

Does present attention reduce ambition?

It may reduce attachment to results or reputation, but not long work with genuine public value.

Meditations

Living in the present does not mean abandoning long-term plans

Meditations says we lose only the present life we are living. It does not oppose long-term planning; it distinguishes present action from imagined ownership of future outcomes.

No one could lose either the past or the future: how can someone take from a person what that person does not possess?Meditations, Book 2.14

The direct answer: planning happens now, while future results are not possessed in advance

At 2.14 Marcus argues that however long a life, only the passing present can be lost. The entry does not tell readers to forget next year. It removes an illusion: treating time not yet arrived as property already secured.

A long-term plan is itself a present action. Budgeting, study, preventative care and allocating resources for shared work can express responsibility. The danger is treating success as guaranteed and thereby neglecting current evidence or relationships.

Separate direction, commitment and next action

A direction describes where you hope to go. A commitment states what you owe and to whom. The next action must be possible now. Review the three at a stable interval, allowing new facts to revise the route without casually abandoning the commitment.

“Only today matters” is a distortion when used to evade debt, health or dependence. An inflexible ten-year plan is equally unlike Stoic attentiveness to changing conditions.

Two checks for future anxiety

First ask whether the worry identifies preparation needed now. If yes, turn it into a calendar entry, reserve or conversation. Then ask whether you are repeatedly simulating an outcome that cannot be addressed today. If yes, return attention to the present action and body.

This does not promise that anxiety vanishes. It gives anxiety only two useful destinations: preparation or release from unproductive occupation.

Limits of planning

Illness, caring duties and unstable conditions shorten the available horizon. Do not use long-termism to shame a person who can only manage today. A responsible plan includes slack for interruption and routes to assistance.