In this way, Seneca gives his readers a way to value the full range of time, to join a broader human community, and to escape the slavery of being forced to live only in the present age. He writes, the life of a wise person is
not constrained by the same limits that constrain others. He alone is freed from the conditions of the human race, and all ages serve him. . . . Some time passes? He holds it in memory. Time is present? He makes use of it. Time is to come? He anticipates it. Combining all times into one makes his life long.
But life is very brief and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they reach life’s end, the poor wretches realize, too late, that they’ve been busy for a long time doing nothing.20
In this remarkable insight, Seneca suggests that the happiest people are not just trapped in the present age. Instead, they can experience the ultimate value of time by weaving past, present, and future together. Here he no longer refers to time as being some kind of limited resource that we might someday run out of if we don’t use it wisely. We now transition from scarcity to being part of a timeless human community, which is inexhaustible.
Seneca challenges us to discover what is timeless and valuable about human nature, and to become better, deeper, and wiser people in the process.
We can now see that the alternative to “preoccupation” and racing around in a flurry of busyness is learning how to live more deeply. And for us today, this doesn’t require becoming a philosopher. Instead, developing an interest in art, music, architecture, science or astronomy, history or literature, or a spiritual tradition, to name a few, could help any modern person to live more deeply. Through these interests, we can take in the wisdom and accomplishments of the greatest thinkers from the past, with whom we can still form relationships. In this way, our lives are no longer limited to the present age, but enlarged and nourished by a timeless community of the human spirit.
CHAPTER 3
How to Overcome Worry and Anxiety
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
—Seneca, Letters 13.4
EVERYONE HAS EXPERIENCED WORRY OR ANXIETY.
Just before writing this chapter, I was alone at home with my small son, who is in grade school. My wife was traveling to a couple of conferences, so it was my duty to take care of him and to make sure that he got to school on time.
All in all, we had a perfect time together, some fun conversations and enjoyable dinners, and we deepened our father–son bond. But there were a few moments when we were leaving the house and going to school when I experienced a bit of panic or anxiety. It wasn’t entirely irrational, but a moment of neurotic thinking that most people suffer from, from time to time.
My anxiety focused on the idea that some kind of mishap could take place, added to by the fact that I live in a place where I speak only a bit of the language, which could make it difficult for me to get help. While I speak enough of the local language to get by in simple settings, like restaurants, and many people here in Sarajevo speak English, there are some who don’t speak any English. In more complex situations, I rely upon my wife to handle translations, and now she was away in a nearby country.
Basically, I started thinking, What if?
What if I locked us out of the house without a key, and no one could help me? (Something similar happened a few months earlier, so we had to change the lock on the front door.) What if I was in a car accident, and my wife wasn’t around to translate? (It could easily happen, since the driving is so terrible here.) What if I suddenly became incapacitated and couldn’t take care of my seven-year-old son while my wife was away? What if . . . ? What if . . . ?
None of these worries were entirely irrational, and that’s how the process begins. People start to worry about the future and also about things that are beyond their control. They start to worry . . . What if? And if things get bad enough, they then start to worry about the fact that they are worrying.
As a keen protopsychologist and student of human nature, Seneca carefully studied how worry and anxiety arise, and how it’s possible to reduce or eliminate anxiety by using the techniques of Stoic philosophy.
WHY PEOPLE WORRY
For Seneca, being able to plan for the future is one of the most amazing gifts that human beings possess. The ability to plan ahead, and to create many things of value, depends upon foresight, which is our inner way of imagining the future.
But while Seneca likens foresight to “a divine gift,” there is nothing worse than worrying about the future (or what could happen), which, for most people, is the leading cause of psychological anxiety. And when people worry like this, it’s because they have taken “foresight, the blessing of the human race,” and turned it into a source of anxiety.1
Throughout his writings, Seneca explores precisely how worry and anxiety arise, and how to eliminate these kinds of worries, or at least how to address them and reduce them significantly. He even describes specific exercises his readers can use to overcome their worries, fears, and anxiety.
Seneca explains that two major fears everyone needs to work on overcoming are the fear of death and the fear of poverty (or the desire for wealth). Since those are important topics, we’ll explore Seneca’s advice about how to do that elsewhere in this book. In this chapter, we look at the more general question of how fear and anxiety arise in the first place, and how to defuse them.
The first teaching of Stoicism is pure common sense: some things are “up to us” or fully within our control, while other things are beyond our control. So far, no one could possibly argue with that. The way the Stoics extend this idea, though, takes more effort to explain.
The next step, according to the Stoics, is to understand that all of the external things beyond our control that happen to us are not truly “bad,” because all such things are just indifferent facts of nature. But they become “bad” based on the mental judgments we make about them, which then create emotional reactions. In fact, nearly all negative emotions originate from judgments or opinions. Today, psychologists call this the cognitive theory of emotion, which the ancient Stoics originated.
This is one belief that every single Stoic philosopher shared, and Marcus Aurelius expressed it this way: “Get rid of the judgment, ‘I’ve been harmed,’ and the feeling of being harmed vanishes. Get rid of the ‘I’ve been harmed,’ and you’re free of the harm itself.”2
Another way of stating this central idea is that while we don’t have control over the external things that happen to us, we do have control over how we respond to them. For example, you can probably remember some rainy day when you were walking down a busy road and a passing car roared through a deep puddle and splashed you. While the splash was unavoidable, how you responded to it mentally was your choice. On the one hand, you could have simply thought, “Oh, I just got splashed.” On the other hand, you could have screamed out, “You ruined my entire day!” Of course, that outburst would have been followed by feelings of rage and fantasies about how you could seek revenge on the driver.
For the Stoics, the first thought, “I just got splashed,” is an objective mental observation about something beyond our control. But the second thought, “You ruined my entire day,” is a judgment or belief that creates anger and emotional suffering.
When we feel upset, we usually think that we are reacting to outer things in the world, but we are actually reacting to things in ourselves: our inner judgments, beliefs, or opinions. And we react emotionally because of the internal judgments we are constantly making. For Seneca and the other Stoics, rather than being irritated by things in the outer world that might be perfectly normal and expected—like getting splashed, or the bad behaviors of other people—it’s better to look at the inner judgments that cause us to feel so upset. In that way, we can learn to live a more tranquil life.