“The truth is, we know little about life, we don't really know what is good news and what is bad news,” Kurt Vonnegut noted when discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on narrative structure. “Every natural process is a very complex integrated process, and it's really impossible to say that anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sad story of learning not to think about gain or loss. And yet most of us spend most of our days worrying about the prospect of what we perceive as negative events, potential losses driven by what we perceive as “bad news.” In the 1930s, a teacher classified anxiety into five categories of anxiety, four of which were imaginary and the fifth, “anxieties with a real basis,” which accounted for “about 8 percent of the total.”
The twenty-four hour news cycle that preys on this human tendency has undoubtedly exacerbated the problem and magnified the 8% to appear as the 98%, but at the heart of this real conflict is an ancient psychological tendency so hard-wired into our minds that it exists outside of external events. First century Roman philosopher Seneca he explored it, and its only real remedy, with unusual insight in a correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, which was later published as Letters from the Stoics (public library) – the timeless course of wisdom that Seneca gave us about the friendship between truth and falsehood and mental discipline to overcome fear.
In his thirteenth book, entitled “On baseless fears,” Seneca writes:
There are many things … that may frighten us rather than crush us; we suffer more in thought than in reality.
Noting the self-harming and weary man's habit of preparing himself for a metaphorical disaster, Seneca advises his young friend:
What I advise you to do is, don't be happy before the disaster comes; because it is possible that the dangers that you see in front of you as if they threaten you, will never happen to you; they certainly haven't arrived yet.
Therefore, some things torture us more than they should; others trouble us before it should; and others trouble us that should not trouble us. We have a tendency to exaggerate, or think, or expect misery.
Seneca then provides us with a critical examination of rational and irrational concerns, using rhetoric to illuminate the folly of wasting our mental and emotional energies in the latter section, which includes most of our concerns:
It is possible that some problems will befall us; but it is not the current reality. How often the unexpected happens! How often expectations never come true! And though it is suspended, what is the use of going out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it comes; so look forward to better things. What will you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many events at the moment that will work to postpone, or end, or transfer to another person, trials that are close or even where you are. The fire opened the way to escape. The men were reduced to a little because of the disaster. Sometimes the sword was even tested on the victim's throat. The men survived their killers. Even bad luck is fickle. Maybe it will come, maybe it won't; currently not. So look forward to better things.
Sixteen centuries before Descartes explored the important relationship between fear and hope, Seneca considered its role in reducing our anxiety:
The mind sometimes creates evil scenarios for itself when there are no signs of any evil; it twists into a very bad construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it likes some personal anger to be worse than it really is, not considering how angry the enemy is, but to what extent he may go when he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our desires, if we satisfy our fears to the greatest extent possible; in this matter, let wisdom help you, and defy with a strong spirit even when it is obvious. If you cannot do this, face other weaknesses, and temper your fears with hope. There is nothing certain among these things that scare us so much that it is not yet certain that the things we fear sink into nothing and that the things we hope for laugh at us. Therefore, examine your hopes and your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your favor; believe what you like. And if fear has won many votes, lean in the other direction anyway, and stop tormenting your soul, you always show that many people who die, even if there are no problems in fact near or really expected in the future, are happy and worried.
But the greatest danger of undue anxiety, Seneca warns, is that by keeping us attentive to the imagined tragedy, it prevents us from living fully. He concludes the book with a quote from Epicurus that illustrates this sobering point:
A fool, with all his other faults, has this too, always preparing for life.
Fill in this particular part of Seneca's most important Letters from the Stoics with Alan Watts on the antidote to anxiety, Italo Calvino on how to reduce your “anxiety”, and Claudia Hammond on what suicide prevention psychology teaches us about managing our daily worries, then revisit Seneca on making the most of life's brevity and the key to resilience when loss occurs.
