I got nothing out of reading meditations after reading Aurelius' quotes. I feel like the whole back can be summarized "Focus on what you can control, don't stress over what you truly can't." Same with ALL of Buddhism.

I agree that the teachings from Stoicism and Buddhism seem simple but I have some difficulty consistently putting them into practice in my daily life. I read about one book a week and out the approximately 50 books a year I read, at least 3 or 4 of those are on Stoicism or Buddhism. (The remainder of my reading allowance is about equal parts of fiction and technology.)

While I am a devoted student of technology and I love learning new programming languages and application domains, I find that I enjoy those "aha" moments from Stoicism and especially from Buddhism. I consider myself very fortunate to have enough time to pursue both tech and philosophy.

I used to get a lot of "aha" moments from books - fiction, non-fiction, bigraphies, whatever. I almost never do anymore. I do feel like there is a point where books become passive entertainment with few exceptions. That's how I felt about Meditations by the time I read it - I knew every idea Aurelius presented. I don't read nearly as much as I used to.

There is more to Buddhism than mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the only thing that matters. The rest comes after that concentration, conduct and moral monastic rules.

Well, that is kind of the tl;dr of the philosophy, but there is a lot more to it. Stoicism has a lot more depth and was a competing life philosophy in Ancient Greece. I would recommend Longs dive into Epictetus. It is much more academic and should tickle deeper thinking about Stoicism than meditations.