Hi folks - this week I’m resharing a post from my book in progress on how to live. I know it’s a message designers can use right now. Hope it helps.
Worry is fascinating in that it is a feeling about something that hasn’t happened yet. It’s not pain, it’s the fear of pain. It’s not sadness, it’s the fear of sadness. Seneca famously wrote that “we suffer more in our imagination than our reality” and he was right. So why do we do this? The answer is worrying about the right things helps us survive. The problem is worrying about the wrong things makes us miserable.
So what is worth worrying about? We all know the answer. It’s worth worrying about things you can influence. This is usually things nearby. If you have a worry, you take the action you can and then move on. It’s not worth worrying more if it does not improve the actions you can take. It’s also not worth worrying about things far away since you can’t do much to help. So why do we worry about far away things?
For most of human history we knew absolutely nothing about what was far away. We knew our tribe, we knew what was in walking distance and that was about it. We wondered about the sky and the weather and worried about that sometimes, but we made up stories about those things so we could worry less. We also worried together with our tribe and helped each other take action to calm our worries.
But today the entire world has collapsed on us through our phones. We’re both aware of everything and crushed by feeling alone in that awareness. And since our brains are designed for survival they treat whatever we see on a screen as being part of our tribe, so we worry, even though we know we can’t do anything about what we see. It’s a kind of self-abuse to be so informed about so many things we can’t influence. Our emotional systems were not built to handle this. And the result is our feelings work against us, rather than to help us.
It’s easy to test this theory. Go for a long walk, in nature if you can, and leave your phone at home. You’ll find that if you do worry about anything it’s something nearby. Or something you can influence. And this is a much healthier way to live. You’ll discover that your worries about the world, which you can’t influence, fade away. Your nervous system will regulate since you are giving it kinds of information it was designed for.
It’s one of the simplest ideas in the world: we can only worry about the things we know about. So why obsess about so many things beyond your ability to influence? Why let so many algorithms and corporations decide for you where your emotions should go? Or perhaps a better question: shouldn’t you be worried about how worried you are to be without your worry generating phone for an hour?
Another way to think about this is self-love. In the movie Magnolia, Donnie Smith, a tragic character, cries out “I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it.” I think of our attention as a kind of self-love. Where do you put your attention? Do you put it in places that are healthy for you? or that can help others? If you love yourself, you have to learn to put your attention in healthy places. But if you are worrying about the world, and feel joyless and paralyzed because of it, what does that say about your relationship with yourself?
There’s an old parable that teaches this idea:
A man once asked an old monk: “How can I be happy when the world is full of suffering?”
The monk asked: “If your mother was sick, would you stop eating?”
The man looked confused. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then there would be two people suffering instead of one.”
The monk smiled. “Exactly.”
“Many people believe that carrying the weight of the entire world on their shoulders is compassion. But often, it is only another form of suffering.”
The man lowered his eyes. “But every day I see bad news. And I feel guilty whenever I experience joy.”
The monk nodded. Then he pointed toward a small flower growing through a crack in a stone path.
“Look at that flower. It grows in a world of storms. It grows in a world where leaves fall, animals die, and winters come. Yet it still blooms.”
“The flower does not ignore suffering. It simply does not allow suffering to stop it from living.”
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