Seneca saw that human beings have powerful imaginations that shape our feelings and the kinds of mental judgments we make. When the power of foresight, which is a kind of imagination, becomes misused, it creates worry, fear, or anxiety, which is different from having a legitimate, rational concern. Because of this, most anxiety is about things that could happen to us in the future, like the what-if story I started this chapter with. What if she leaves me? What if I have an accident and can no longer work? What if I reach retirement age and don’t have enough money to live?
These might be entirely legitimate concerns, and they might demand serious, rational attention. But they become something else—sources of fear and inner turmoil—when we lose our mental composure. For Seneca, fear is a form of slavery, and “there is nothing worse than worry about future events,” which “sets our minds trembling with unaccountable fear.”3 The only way to avoid this, he explains, is to not “reach forward” mentally but to live in the present moment, and to realize that the present moment is complete and perfect just as it is. As Seneca explains often, you can only be anxious about the future if you view the present moment as being unfulfilling.
Whenever Seneca discusses fear or anxiety, he’s always quick to point out how to overcome these kinds of worries: instead of mentally “time traveling” to some imaginary point in the future when something bad might happen, and worrying about it now, live in the present moment. Marcus Aurelius, who read Seneca, agreed. He wrote that the only life we truly have is in the present moment.4
For Seneca, worrying about the future (or having regrets about the past) is an entirely psychological phenomenon in which people indulge their negative emotions. As he explains, because the past and the future are both absent, and we can feel neither of them, the only source of pain can be a person’s emotions, opinions, or imagination.
I don’t know if Mark Twain ever read Seneca, but he is said to have expressed a similar thought: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” In other words, they were imaginary.
Seneca explains how to return to the present moment. He also describes other remedies for worry and anxiety. But before we examine these in depth, let’s take a closer look at how worry arises in the first place.
AN IMAGINARY HOUSE OF MIRRORS
In his writings, Seneca draws upon the imagination in powerful ways. He conjures up stunning descriptions of scenery to create a mood or to set the stage for something he’s going to explain. While a rational thinker, he also uses the imagination to sometimes offer an image of transcendent beauty, like his thought, “I wish that mankind could glimpse philosophy in all its unity, so that it would appear unveiled like the glory of the starry heavens at night.”5 Then, like other Stoic philosophers, Seneca sometimes offers an imaginary exercise or visualization, which can be psychologically beneficial. One such practice, which was made famous by Marcus Aurelius, is called today “the view from above”: it involves imagining yourself far above our planet and looking down on the Earth below, to see how small we are, and realizing how tiny our personal troubles are in relation to the greater universe.
As we’ve seen, Seneca also praises the imaginative power of foresight, which allows us to create the future. But despite this positive belief in the goodness of the imagination, Seneca recognizes that the imagination can take negative forms. It can help give rise to human obsessions, and it can also give birth to worries and fears that spiral out of control. “Even when nothing is wrong,” he writes, “and nothing is certain to go wrong in the future, most people burn with anxiety.”6
When the imagination becomes mixed with raw emotion, this can create a feedback loop in which imagination amplifies emotions and emotions then amplify the imagination. (Modern psychologists sometimes call this experience of “becoming anxious about being anxious” meta-worry or meta-anxiety.) In a situation like this, with the imagination and emotions each amplifying one another, the entire system can spin out of control, resulting in extreme anxiety, panic attacks, or other psychological symptoms. In a situation like this, when the imagination reflects fear and fear reflects the imagination, we could refer to it as an imaginary house of mirrors, fueled by emotion. While everyone experiences worry or anxiety at some point, people who experience extreme anxiety live in a place like this frequently. As Seneca writes, “Each person is as miserable as he imagines himself to be.”7
Seneca didn’t use the image of a house of mirrors. He used the image of a maze instead. Seneca says that the happy life is fully available, right here and now, in the present moment. But by seeking it elsewhere or in other things, people lose the freedom of confidence they would already possess if they were fully present. He then likens this state to running through a maze, in which you lose the awareness of your true self: “This is what happens when you speed through a maze: the faster you race, the worse you become entangled.”8
HOW TO OVERCOME WORRY
In Seneca’s philosophy, there are several ways to overcome worry, and they’re all rather simple. But since Stoicism involves practice, and is a practical philosophy like Buddhism, these solutions must be applied for them to work.
One of the first and most effective ways to reduce worry is simply to monitor your inner judgments and the emotions they give rise to as the process happens, and as you start to feel anxious about future events. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus called this practice prosochē, “mindfulness” or “attention.” Once we understand how emotions arise and learn to monitor this process in real time, at the exact moment that anxiety is first felt, we can make a conscious choice to follow Seneca’s advice: this involves calling our mind back from the future to live fully in the present, because the future doesn’t even exist.
For a Stoic like Seneca, it’s reasonable to be concerned about future events but it’s a mistake to worry about something in advance that might not even happen. As he wrote to Lucilius, “My advice to you is this: Don’t be miserable ahead of time. Those things you fear, as if they were near at hand, might never arrive. Certainly, they haven’t arrived yet.”9 This is one piece of advice that Seneca stressed many times over, throughout his writings. Marcus Aurelius also supported this view when he wrote, “Don’t allow the future to trouble you,” because when it does arrive, you’ll face it with the same sense of reason you apply to the present moment.10
Second, since anxiety, fear, and psychological suffering arise from bad judgments, faulty opinions, or a misuse of the imagination, Seneca asks us to undertake a key Stoic practice: to analyze wisely our patterns of thinking in order to understand the source of the suffering. For if anxiety arises from faulty beliefs, by rationally analyzing those beliefs and dismantling them, we can also cure the distress. As Seneca puts it, “We agree with opinion too quickly. We don’t test those thoughts that lead us to fear, or question them with care. . . . So let’s examine things carefully.”11 Modern cognitive psychologists call this kind of inquiry Socratic questioning, another tip of their hat to ancient philosophy.