Anxious about what’s next
Seneca on imagined fears: the full passage from Letter 13
For when your mind is already living through something that hasn’t happened.
There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
In plain words
Seneca is writing to a friend, offering ways to steady himself against fear (the letter is titled “On groundless fears”). His observation is that we live through a bad thing once in real life and many times in our heads. A lot of what weighs on us is “might”, not “is”.
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Worth knowing
He says up front that he isn’t speaking “in the Stoic strain but in my milder style”, a gentler tone than the strict Stoic line, which would dismiss such fears outright.
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