system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How did Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic philosophy reconcile his “living in the moment is the correct way of life” beliefs with the inherent necessity of looking to the future to be a good emperor?

In Book 3 of the Meditations he reiterates how a good man does not want to control his future and how one should strive to accept one’s daily life’s happenings yet he as an expansionist emperor must have had a vision and plan for the future of Rome, else he’d feel all he’s doing is for nought which his philosophy rejects.
gpt
Stoic philosophy is about virtue ethics in the here and now. It places strong emphasis on playing the cards you have been dealt (the Romans didn't have cards, but Epictetus does use the equivalent example of a dice game at one point). So it doesn't exactly require a vision and plan for the future. 

The main thing to bear in mind is that Marcus's reign had terrible waves of epidemic disease as well as troublesome border wars on the Danube. The _Meditations_ were written quite late in his life, the Antonine plaque had killed countless people including his co-emperor Verus, and probably killed many of Marcus' own children (Marcus lost maybe eight or nine children). So it's not a document about grand plans for the future, it's about him trying to make sense of the present, but from a certain Stoic cosmic point of view.