Another day, another quote from my notes from Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.
There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Imagine this, you are tasked with sending an important email to some new partners. This is your chance to create a good first impression with those newly onboarded partners. Say your boss really wants you to ensure there are no mistakes. Yet once you send those 11 emails, you spot you screwed up the subject. You start preparing to be fired, you know that’s a big mistake. Your mind starts imagining the end game and then………nothing happens. All ends well, the screw up wasn’t as bad as you imagined. This is exactly what Seneca is saying, most things are frightening, we get afraid thinking about them. We suffer more from them in our imagination versus reality.
Out of the 2 people that read this blog, the above just happened with one of them last week. So this is for that person, you know who you are!
This isn’t a long post, if you are like my friend and me, you also overthink stuff, you also get tortured more in your imagination than reality. So listen to Seneca, he knows what he is talking about.
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.