Hecato says, “Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.” … The primary cause of both these ills is that instead of adapting ourselves to present circumstances we send out thoughts too far ahead.
– Seneca, Moral Letters, 5.7b-8
This one is very interesting. While I imagine most people would indeed consider hope and fear two sides of the same coin, I don’t imagine most people would consider them the same. Hope is good and fear is bad, right?
Wrong. Both are at odds with present moment, and both are entirely outside of your control. That doesn’t mean it is wrong to hope or wrong to fear, but it is wrong to invest your valuable time and energy too deeply on something that may not come to pass, or that is “too far ahead” as Seneca writes.
Two of my other favorite quotes are also along these lines. Seneca said in perhaps his most famous line, “we suffer more in imagination than in reality,” and Marcus Aurelius wrote, “don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole.”
I come back to these lines often and share them with others because this seems to be at the root of anxiety for a lot of people. I have seen multiple people multiple times convince themselves everything was horrible despite them being objectively in the best situation they have ever been in their lives. Just the other day at work I was having a tough discussion with someone fearful of the future that was extrapolating worst case scenarios about things that may never come to pass.
It is easy to suffer worries imagined, but what about suffering wants imagined? Part of what is fascinating about this to me is that this can manifest in a couple of different ways, and none of them good. Some people when imagining wants will encounter loss aversion over something they have never obtained, and loss aversion is extremely potent in the human mind. I know friends who would rather dream of asking out a specific woman in their lives than give it a shot because they can ruminate on it endlessly if they never bring it to a conclusion (a Schroedinger’s Relationship). This is want and fear manifested at the same time! In some ways this is a remarkable achievement of the human mind, as there is no other animal we know of that can achieve these sorts of mental gymnastics.
The other manifestation I find interesting here is what happens when you get what you want. If you have convinced yourself you deserve it and it comes to pass then it may mean far less to you than if it had just happened in the present without any seriousness or import bestowed upon it in your mind. This ties back into the Hedonic Treadmill and the innate human feature of never being satisfied with the here and now. By the time you get what you want you are already hoping, imagining, and wanting the next thing. It can also turn into a sense of entitlement if you convince yourself that this hope of yours should come to pass, and the sense of disappointment may be profound when it does not occur and you have, in Marcus’ words, “let your imagination be crushed by life.”
We all want and we all worry. We all hope and we all fear. But we must also understand that these things can be dangerous because they exist solely in our minds, and, consequently, we directly control how dramatic, impactful, or erroneous they ultimately are.
Cash Flow 