Guest Post by Maria Popova
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be “bad news.” In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, “worries that have a real foundation,” occupying “possibly 8% of the total.”
A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic (public library) — the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca on true and false friendship and the mental discipline of overcoming fear.
In his thirteenth letter, titled “On groundless fears,” Seneca writes:
There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
With an eye to the self-defeating and wearying human habit of bracing ourselves for imaginary disaster, Seneca counsels his young friend:
What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.
Seneca then offers a critical assessment of reasonable and unreasonable worries, using elegant rhetoric to illuminate the foolishness of squandering our mental and emotional energies on the latter class, which comprises the vast majority of our anxieties:
It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.
Art by Catherine Lepange from ‘Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to Ease a Worried Mind.’
Sixteen centuries before Descartes examined the vital relationship between fear and hope, Seneca considers its role in mitigating our anxiety:
The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.
But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living. He ends the letter with a quote from Epicurus illustrating this sobering point:
The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.
Complement this particular portion of Seneca’s wholly indispensable Letters from a Stoic with Alan Watts on the antidote to the age of anxiety, Italo Calvino on how to lower your “worryability,” and Claudia Hammond on what the psychology of suicide prevention teaches us about controlling our everyday worries, then revisit Seneca on making the most of life’s shortness and the key to resilience when loss does strike.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Excellent analysis. I wish I could have discovered this outlook long ago, but there is no time like the present…
How does that line go,about the brave man dying one death while the coward dies a thousand deaths?
That drawing showing a visual likeness of Lenin shooting red rays out of his eyes doesn’t bother me a’tall. 🙂
Someone once calculated that almost everything we worry about …. never actually happens.
Wonderful article.
Sometimes that’s because we worry.
See what happens to people/animals with an amygdalectomy.
They’d be fearless. Studies have shown that psychopaths have amygdala that are smaller or that don’t process “worry” information from the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
there’s a further dimension to this. bad things do happen. Often our own decisions even contributed to their eventual occurrence. Sometimes those were obvious fuckups on our part, but many times no matter what we do shit happens. we need to be able to hold on to ourselves through such difficulties. It’s perhaps harder to do so than it is to not worry about potential shit happening, and when it does happen, its not just some happy horseshit to ‘think positive’ but rather to take stock of what we still have, what’s in our hands and what’s out of our hands, and how do we go forward from where we are.
it might be good to think about how we’d handle such setbacks before they befall us, when they do hit it is easy to be overwhelmed by them.
Stoic is my middle name. In the midst of this war on humans, I am at peace . I do wonder when people will stop with this “us” against the “leftists” and start a counter against those who are warring against and killing humanity. Until 100% attention is given to the true enemy, this war will be very one sided and far more damage will be done than in a conventional war.
I’ll be waiting, still creating my own reality daily but keeping an eye on the movie others are watching.
It does have a theatrical quality to it from this point of view.
Lunch and bowling. Penn Station Subs.HH ET AL … great Chicken Caesar wrap.
Great meet, eat and greet on a Saturday afternoon.
It’s Sunday Ghost
It is a mistake to judge anything “good” or “bad” right away, since events often have unexpectedly results. I suspect even Covid will be a net positive gain for many. We get annoyed by our routines getting interrupted, but they are are mostly randomly chosen and sometime outlive their usefulness. Having to be idle gives people time to reflect, and perhaps pick different, more positive paths. Years from now, I expect to hear some people saying, “The shutdown was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
If the assumption is the resumption of normalcy. If all of society were to be able to return to the levels of activity, both socially, politically and religiously, that they participated in before this societal paradigm shift called Covid 19 occurred. And if the George Floyd event had not coincided with the overwhelming madness that overtook and overstimulated the wrong hormones in the wrong mammals, there might be a possibility of a return to normalcy when “learning to cope with the shutdown and learn better healthier life skills was the best thing that could have happened to me…” but I think the odds of a true return to a time like that is less than most think.
They will never stop until they are stopped.
The following quote was included in one of the above linked articles and is, perhaps, particularly pertinent to our time:
In a way it calls to mind what the Book of Revelation said of the Laodicean Church:
Again, suffering occurs when ignorance meets reality.
Reminds me of one my favorites…
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
That’s one of my favorites, too, and many times has proven true.
Un- We have a favorite around here: Hero to zero in less than 10 seconds.
I have seen that too, hubris and greed or boasting and bragging will meet a great fall. All Americans are not in that category….and did you ever notice the CLUB never seems to completely fall out of favor or money? Just us regulah Joe’s. Hhmmm
What/ who do they know that we don’t…..oh yeah, other club members.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow, it may not be yours.