I had a heated an interesting conversation with my partner yesterday.

It started as a really interesting, stimulating conversation about goal setting and habit tracking but at some point the discussion turned personal and more about us as individuals. We’d both had long days and we both got a bit defensive. It happens! It sucks, but it happens.

Among other things, I was defending the fact that I don’t know what I want, and that sometimes I don’t know what I want but that I want to succeed. I want so badly to succeed in some general, ambiguous, airbag sense but I have this awful tendency to think that I must suffer in order for it to happen1. Part of me thinks that I simply haven’t suffered enough to learn the lessons which make successful people so wise. Today I heard this line on a podcast:

“The pain will come.”

They laughed as they said it.

Don’t worry about it, the pain is gonna come and it’s gonna hurt. You don’t have to worry about seeking pain out because it will find you. And if you let it, the pain will change you. You can feel the pain and learn from it, or you can not feel the pain and numb yourself to it. Either way is change, but I like to think I’d pick the former over the latter.

It’s a stoic thing too right? This idea of letting the future pain be future pain is conflicting to me sometimes. Seneca says “He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary”, but there exists this stoic practice of Premeditatio Malorum or envisioning bad things happening to what we cherish with the intention of becoming more grateful for them. I used to do it here and there, and it worked! I was more grateful for everything than I would normally be!

It was anxiety-inducing!2 You don’t have to be a philosopher to know that this kind of thinking would lead to some major freak-outs. 3

But is this not suffering before it’s necessary? I think it’s a choice.

Suffering from a fear is not the same as envisioning a bad future. By choosing to envision a bad future, we are making an active choice to enter into a mindset of Bad Vibes and actually practicing Premeditatio Malorum, not just choosing to think about random worst-case scenarios and freaking out about them. “Suffering before necessary” is a bad habit; Predmeditatio Malorum is a practice, like a meditation.

What I realised was that it was not a practice you could do just part of. By premeditating the Malorum, you’re placing yourself in a worst case scenario in as much detail as realistic as you can make it, and calmly navigating yourself through it. It’s a drill. But if you pull out halfway and you haven’t reached the other side and are still deep in the visualisation, it might be hard to shake yourself of the bad vibes.

As a short term gratitude thing I think it has its benefits. Sometimes I can feel myself getting a little ungrateful for life. I stop appreciating the privilege I have. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that same top percentile. If you’re ever feeling like—I dunno—you don’t want to do the dishes, or you don’t want to do a thing you should do, then this is a good little practice.

Long-term, I’ll stick with optimism, thank you very much. Don’t suffer before you need to. There’s a case to be made for “manifesting”, there’s research backing positive self-talk through hard times, and it just seems like a better solution to be positive about what the future holds. Selection bias can go either way. Thinking more about the negative may be good for our defenses but if you are already suffering from social-evaluative concern or threat (SET), you don’t really stand to benefit much from what has been called “defensive pessimism” . Thinking about the positives opens you up to a wider range of possibilities for what may bring you joy. Wouldn’t that be nice.

To paraphrase Michael Pollan’s Eat Food4 line: Be mindful. Not too much. Mostly gratitude

Footnotes

  1. I feel like this is such a typical Guy Thing. Pain has to have meaning and that meaning is our growth, so we see it as a good thing, an ego boosting thing. So we seek it out for the sake of it. “Women are born with pain built in” . If I could watch a show for the first time again, Fleabag would be top of that list. ↩

  2. It feels a bit like realising existentialism: the freedom is daunting. But the freedom your mind has to conjure up a worst-case scenario is unbounded. That scares me. ↩

  3. There’s a Buddhist case to be made for not being so attached to what we cherish (spoiler alert: it’s the ego), but that’s for another time. ↩

  4. Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants. ↩