Most of the things I worry about never happen. This should be reassuring, but my mind draws the opposite conclusion: clearly the worrying worked. We are built to anticipate danger, and occasionally that ability saves us. More often, though, it leaves us suffering through futures that never arrive. How much peace is possible without giving up the attachments that make life matter?
Listen to the Episode
The Big Questions
- Why do we continue to worry when we know that worry will not change the future?
- How can we distinguish useful preparation from anxiety that merely feels productive?
- Are our emotions natural responses, or do they arise from mistaken judgments?
- Can a person live well when nearly everything important is outside of their control?
- Does detachment reduce suffering, or does it also diminish love, desire, and commitment?
- What is the difference between accepting pain and becoming passive toward it?
- How much tranquility would we actually want if it required loosening our grip on the world?
The Argument
Worry once had an obvious purpose. A creature that notices danger, remembers scarcity, and prepares for winter has a better chance of surviving than one that cheerfully assumes everything will work out. The problem is that our circumstances have changed faster than our minds. I can check my email twenty times without finding anything that truly requires my attention, yet each check carries the promise of threat or reward. A psychological system built to spot predators now spends much of its time monitoring inboxes.
The Stoics locate the problem in our judgments. Most of what happens to us—health, wealth, reputation, the behavior of other people, and the eventual consequences of our decisions—lies outside our control. What remains ours is the way we understand and respond to it. For Seneca, worrying about an uncertain future means suffering before suffering is required. Marcus Aurelius tried to train himself out of this habit by repeatedly writing down the same reminders. The point was not literary originality. It was to make a difficult idea sink in: events do not wait for our permission, but our judgments about them are not entirely beyond us.
Buddhism begins elsewhere but reaches a related diagnosis. We suffer because we crave what we do not have and cling to what cannot remain. We mistake ourselves and the things around us for fixed objects when they are continually changing. Pain may be unavoidable, but the mental struggle that gathers around it can sometimes be loosened. Acceptance and commitment therapy adapts part of this insight without promising an escape from suffering. A painful thought does not need to be defeated before we act. We can notice it, allow it to be present, and still move toward what we value.
I find these approaches more useful as practices than as complete ways of life. I do not want to extinguish attachment to the people I love, and I am not convinced that passion is simply a reasoning error. Still, there is a difference between caring deeply and imagining that care gives me control. Pleasure asks what I can enjoy; virtue asks who I can become; service asks what I will bind myself to. Detachment asks what I might release. The difficulty is knowing which grip sustains a life and which merely tightens around it.
Reflect
What future event are you repeatedly suffering through before it has happened, and what would remain if you stopped rehearsing it?
Which of your attachments give your life depth, and which ones quietly turn love, work, or achievement into a demand for control?
When pain cannot be removed, what would it mean to make room for it without allowing it to determine your next action?
Further Exploration
Seneca’s letters and essays
Seneca names anticipatory anxiety as a way of surrendering the present to uncertain futures, while insisting that there will be time enough to suffer when suffering actually arrives. Particularly interesting is Letter 13.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Marcus Aurelius shows philosophy functioning as daily training: repeated written reminders meant to reshape habitual judgments rather than impress a reader.
The Four Noble Truths
The Four Noble Truths shift attention from the events that disappoint us to the craving and attachment that make disappointment an enduring condition.
The Noble Eightfold Path
The Noble Eightfold Path gives detachment a practical form by treating speech, conduct, attention, and mindfulness as disciplines through which attachment can gradually loosen.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
ACT brings detachment into ordinary life by asking us to stop fighting every painful thought and to act according to our values even while discomfort remains. I have found Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap, to be a useful introduction.
Continuing the Conversation
I invite you to email reflections and questions directly to me. I will not respond to them all individually, but questions from listeners may become the starting point for future episodes.
I have also created a Chatbot to accompany this podcast. You can interact with it here.
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Full Transcript
What do you worry about more: things you did in the past, or things that might happen in the future?
I’m a worrier. I’m less bothered by things that have already happened—the mistakes and gaffes I’ve made, and there are plenty of those—than by my fear of the future. My mind swirls with improbable outcomes, even for the happiest of things. I often think that behind every silver lining is a nearby storm cloud.
When I plan things, I almost instinctively build in Plan B and Plan C. Once in a rare while, this tendency to prepare for the worst has served me well. Things do sometimes go wrong, and when they do and I am prepared, it reinforces my sense that all this planning must be doing some good.
But the truth is that the things I fear seldom come to pass. They are outside my control, and no amount of worrying will change them. Even knowing this, though, doesn’t help much. As I write this paragraph, in fact, I’m worried that I’ll mess up the podcast delivery. Why would I worry about such a thing when it would have no actual consequences beyond another three minutes of audio editing?
What’s wrong with me?
You’re listening to Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life, a podcast about ancient wisdom, modern psychology, and the search for a life that is not only successful but meaningful. I’m Michael Satlow.
Today: Why do we worry, and can greater detachment help?
What’s wrong with me is simply that I’m human. It is true that we all worry and experience anxiety to different degrees. But our psychological tendency, simply as human beings, to worry is strong—far stronger than our propensity toward happiness.
This is easy to understand from an evolutionary perspective. Like all living organisms, we are built with the primary directive of staying alive. We constantly look for signs of danger: a saber-toothed tiger, perhaps, or an enemy from a rival clan waiting to harm us. Our reflexes are slow and our natural means of defense weak. All we have are our wits and our clan.
We also know that winter will come, crops will stop growing, and food will become scarcer. Our fear of the future leads us to plan so that we can survive until the next year. In such an environment, worrying can mean the difference between life and death.
Our drives toward pleasure, reproduction, and a general sense of well-being are not unimportant, but they take a back seat to the more pressing need for survival.
Our social circumstances today are vastly different from those of our distant ancestors. From an evolutionary perspective, however, we have hardly budged.
We still need to worry. Communities and countries continue to face mortal threats. I would much rather have a pessimistic worrier than a cheerful glad-hander serving as my country’s defense minister or spymaster. People—especially women—sometimes find themselves alone in unfamiliar and dangerous places, where worry is an appropriate means of anticipating and reacting to potential danger.
There is still plenty of real danger in the world, and in such cases worry helps us get through to the other side.
But most of us spend most of our time in environments where mortal danger does not frequently loom around the corner. We face challenges, to be sure, but they rarely have catastrophic consequences.
I go through phases of checking my email constantly, yet I almost never find a message for which an immediate response produces any real benefit. In the few cases when it might, delaying my response by a few hours—or even days or weeks—will not result in the loss of my job, my house, or my family.
I know this, yet I continue to check, driven by a combination of fear and the anticipation of one of those rare messages bearing good news and delivering a shot of dopamine. Social media is designed to exploit these psychological systems on an exponential scale, increasing the anxiety of many of its users.
We do not need to turn to modern technological innovations, however, to grasp the essential mismatch between our psychological responses and the cultural environments in which we live. Thinkers long ago diagnosed the problem.
For the rest of this episode, I will explore the diagnoses and proposed solutions offered mainly by two groups: the Stoics and the Buddhists. Each provides a version of the same answer, which I will call detachment.
By detachment, I mean a stance that recognizes that much human suffering comes from worry, which is a state of mind. As a state of mind or consciousness, it is not itself an external reality. It may be difficult to change, but we can exert at least some control over our thoughts. We reduce suffering by detaching ourselves from the thought that is causing it.
Life is thus best led at some distance—perhaps physical, but certainly mental—from our ordinary, day-to-day frustrations.
Detachment will serve as our fourth and final paradigm of the good life, complementing pleasure, virtue, and service. It is perhaps the most difficult to embody, but it offers valuable lessons.
We may not aspire to the life of a Tibetan monk any more than we aspire to the lives of Rihanna, Nelson Mandela, or Mother Teresa. But we might still have something to learn from such a life.
Let’s begin with the Stoics.
Stoicism began around 300 BCE in Athens. From its earliest formulations, Stoic thinkers wrestled with the question of how human beings can—or should—live in the world.
In their understanding, the world was a single living organism driven by the logos, by which they meant a kind of divine reason. Because the world was governed by reason, it was both highly ordered and fated. Reason, as they understood it, led in only one direction and toward one answer.
Human beings are inextricably bound to this world and are therefore also subject to the fate of the logos.
The philosophical problem, of course, is the classic problem of free will. If we are merely tiny parts of a cosmos being driven inexorably and unchangeably by the logos, do we possess any agency or free will?
In response, the early Stoics made a critical distinction between what is governed by fate and what is not. Most things are governed by fate: our health, whether we will be rich or poor, and what happens to us during the course of a day.
But we are left with one small domain in which we can exercise agency: our judgments. We, rather than fate, control how we perceive and respond to the events swirling around us.
Like Aristotle, the Stoics believed that we must order our lives according to reason and that reason leads to virtue. Living the good life of eudaimonia means living in accordance with reason, which in turn leads us to value the virtues.
In two major respects, however, the Stoic model differs from Aristotle’s.
First, Aristotle acknowledges that certain material conditions are necessary for the good life. It is impossible to lead the good life if you do not have enough food to eat or if you have no friends.
This is not true for the Stoics. Your judgments—how you understand and process the information that comes through your senses—are entirely within your control. The good life depends on the proper exercise of reason and on a deep understanding of how much of life lies outside your control.
For the Stoics, even if you have no money and no friends, are enslaved, or find yourself in some other horrendously wretched situation, you can still live the good life.
But how can an enslaved person lead the good life? Isn’t this simply a kind of definitional jujitsu, in which we completely change what we mean by “the good life”?
Here we come to the second major difference between Aristotle and the Stoics.
For Aristotle, the passions—primal feelings such as lust, desire, anger, and fear—are natural and must be tempered through reason. Our task is to use reason to transform the extremes of fear and recklessness into the virtue of courage.
For the Stoics, however, the passions result from false judgments. The idea that a passion we would regard as natural, such as sexual attraction or lust, is actually the result of a false judgment is hardly intuitive.
A Stoic might reason as follows.
You perceive someone as attractive. Rationally, you know that the only true good is virtue. Beauty and sex are, in themselves, morally neutral—or “indifferent,” to use the Stoic term. They are neither good nor bad.
Yet when you see the attractive person, you make the false judgment that having sex with that person would be good. This false judgment generates and inflames the passion of lust. Lust, in this account, is the product of a cognitive exercise.
This does not mean that all sex is bad. One might decide to have sex in order to procreate, which is a civic good and therefore perhaps virtuous. Sex might also nurture marital affection, another good.
Such a sexual act, however, would have to be informed by a reasoned and correct judgment rather than by a physical passion springing from a false judgment.
I would suppose that true Stoics were not particularly good sexual partners.
For the Stoics, then, the ideal state is apatheia: having so thoroughly mastered one’s rational capacities that the passions no longer arise. This is the ultimate goal and defines what it means to lead the good life—to remain calm rather than being ruled by passions that emerge from false judgments about what is truly good or bad.
Only the sage reaches this state. The sage does not simply understand reason and know how to apply it, but essentially embodies it.
The Star Trek character Spock is modeled on this kind of figure, although Spock, unlike the Stoic sage, never had to work to achieve that degree of rationality.
Stoicism is known today largely through its Roman form. Roman philosophers—or at least the famous ones whose writings survived—tended to be less interested in the theoretical foundations of the system. Instead, they homed in on its practical elements.
Philosophers in antiquity were overwhelmingly male and wealthy, largely because such people found it easier to acquire an education and had the leisure necessary to teach, read, and write.
In Rome during the late Republic and the Empire, such men moved through politically treacherous circles. Political alliances and imperial whims shifted quickly, and backing the wrong party at the wrong time could be deadly. As in Putin’s Russia, this caused no small amount of anxiety among those who were vulnerable.
Stoicism provided a useful resource for dealing with these negative emotions.
Seneca is probably the best exemplar of Roman Stoicism. Born into a wealthy family in Spain around 4 BCE—perhaps the very year in which Jesus was born—he studied rhetoric, a common choice for the sons of wealthy men who expected to work in civic and administrative positions.
He eventually made his way to Rome as a legal advocate and became a member of the Senate, a position reserved not merely for the most able but for the wealthiest and best connected. He also attended lectures by Stoic and Pythagorean philosophers.
His abilities attracted the attention of the imperial court, and he was appointed tutor to the young prince Nero. When Nero became emperor, Seneca became one of his advisers.
Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, Seneca ran afoul of court intrigue and was forced, much like Socrates, to take his own life. Later retellings and artistic depictions of his death were numerous, and the event made a deep cultural impact.
Seneca was a prolific writer of letters, short essays, and plays. Many of his favorite themes recur throughout these genres. One was the Stoic emphasis on our fundamental lack of control over our own fate—an exceedingly important cause of human suffering.
Much of our angst, he argues, is caused by fretting over the past or the future. There will be plenty of time to worry about the future once it arrives. Since we cannot know how the future will actually unfold, no good comes from worrying about it now.
“You will suffer soon enough,” he writes. “So look forward, meanwhile, to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time.”
Elsewhere, he observes that “we let ourselves drift with every breeze” and “are frightened at uncertainties, just as if they were certain.”
Developing the ability to follow Seneca’s advice and hold our fears of the future at bay is no mean feat. We are psychologically built to worry. Sometimes this very capacity can save our lives.
On the other hand, we know that the great bulk of our worries about the future are groundless and pointless. Even a small reduction in the amount and intensity of such worry might be beneficial.
How do we achieve it?
Another Stoic—no less than Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor from 161 to 180 CE—provides one example. Given the demands of administering an empire and waging wars, he needed both time and a measure of inner peace.
He kept notebooks in which he wrote short reminders to himself, recalling and applying Stoic lessons. Writing became for him a form of askesis—literally, “training,” and the root of the word asceticism. Today, we would call his practice journaling.
Some of these notes, although never intended for outside readers, survived and can now be read as his Meditations. They are neither especially profound nor self-revelatory, but they were never meant to be.
How do you remind yourself that human beings are small and insignificant when measured against the cosmos, and that much of our fear is neither productive nor worthwhile? You write that message to yourself again and again, until perhaps it truly takes root.
Does it matter whether it is literally true?
The Stoics thus offer a model for understanding unhappiness and mitigating its effects. The key lesson is to recognize what is and is not under our control.
When we truly realize—in a deep and fundamental way—that most of the things upsetting us are outside our control, the unhappiness begins to dissolve. We recognize it as a byproduct of our own errors in reasoning.
What is under our control is our ability to master our thinking, avoid being drawn into those errors, and devote our energy instead to cultivating virtue.
It is a fine idea in theory, although, as we all know, far harder to implement in practice.
Buddhism offers a related approach to unhappiness and its treatment.
The fundamental root of unhappiness in Buddhist teachings is our tendency to crave and cling. We crave food, sex, love, and even existence itself. We cling to our possessions and to other people. Existentially, we are in a constant state of desire and attachment.
This attachment to the world is also, as in Stoicism, a kind of cognitive misperception. We fail to recognize the true nature of things. We mistake the self for something fixed, independent, and permanent, whereas Buddhist teaching sees it as impermanent, conditioned, and constantly changing.
Everything we experience reaches us through consciousness. We never encounter the world except through it.
The basic framework of Buddhist teaching is encapsulated in what are known as the Four Noble Truths.
The first truth is that ordinary human existence is pervaded by dukkha: suffering, dissatisfaction, unease, or unsatisfactoriness.
The second truth is that suffering derives from attachment and craving. As long as we desire, we are bound to suffer. We will never obtain everything we desire, and we will inevitably lose the things to which we are attached.
Before moving to the third Noble Truth, I want to pause and acknowledge that not all suffering seems to be the result of attachment. There is physical suffering, as well as suffering caused by external forces.
Buddhists would not claim that physical pain is unreal. They would argue, however, that we have some power to shape how we perceive and respond to it. When facing a painful or deadly disease, for example, a person might interpret or meet it as a test. It may therefore be useful to distinguish pain—the physical sensation—from the mental response we have to it.
The third Noble Truth is that suffering can be alleviated by extinguishing desire and attachment. The state of freedom from attachment is known as nirvana.
The fourth Noble Truth concerns how nirvana can be reached: through the Noble Eightfold Path. The path emphasizes practices such as right speech and mindfulness. It is a kind of toolkit for helping a person leave desire and attachment behind.
In much modern Western discourse, these and other Buddhist ideas are detached from their much broader religious and cosmological context.
At the heart of this context is the belief in an enduring cycle of life, rebirth, reward, and punishment. It is a world filled with deities and other beings who can help or hinder us on our quest. Buddhist life is often tied more closely to acts of piety than to an abstract philosophical system comparable to that of the Stoics.
These Buddhist teachings overlap with some modern forms of therapy, especially ACT—Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
ACT does not ask us to defeat painful thoughts or prove them false. It asks us to notice them, make room for them, loosen their grip on us, and continue to act in accordance with our values.
Suffering is a reality. The question is how we respond to it.
As a therapeutic rather than religious framework, ACT teaches people to accept suffering and respond to it in helpful rather than debilitating ways.
Someone who fears social situations, for example, might be encouraged to acknowledge that fear and nevertheless attend a social event because doing so would make a family member or spouse happy. The person acts according to their values even while experiencing fear.
This might produce discomfort, but it is a healthier response than social isolation.
As a practical matter, ACT does not promise the Buddhist possibility of a complete escape from suffering.
In Theravada Buddhism, the liberated ideal is often called the arhat. In Mahayana Buddhism, the bodhisattva becomes a central ideal: one who seeks awakening not only for himself or herself, but for the liberation of all beings.
Some bodhisattvas become objects of intense devotion and veneration. Like the Stoic sage, this is an ideal that very few people can fully reach. Unlike the sage, however, some bodhisattvas are understood as celestial beings whom later followers venerate, often through their images.
Buddhist monks and nuns exemplify an extreme attempt to detach themselves from desire.
Although some of their ascetic practices resemble those of Christian monks and nuns, there are crucial differences. Christian monastics desire closeness to God. Desire lies at the heart of their practice, with physical asceticism intended to channel that desire toward a higher object.
Buddhist monastic practice aims not to redirect desire toward God, but to loosen craving and attachment so that compassion and awakening become possible.
So where does that leave us?
Personally, I see the Stoic, Buddhist, and therapeutic approaches examined here as providing less an orientation for an entire life than a set of strategies that can help mitigate my own suffering.
Simply acknowledging that I have no control over the future—or that I can mentally reframe an external setback or even physical pain—is useful. It does not make the suffering disappear, but it puts it into perspective and often takes the edge off.
Detachment is unappealing to me as an entire way of life. Relationships and passion, despite all their drawbacks, are too important for me to want to give them up.
But I see the appeal. I sometimes find myself envying people whose lives seem calmer and more tranquil.
Over the course of these episodes, we have explored four ways of imagining the good life.
Pleasure asks what we can enjoy.
Virtue asks what kind of person we can become.
Service asks who or what we are willing to bind ourselves to.
Detachment asks what we can release.
None of these is sufficient by itself. A good life may require some capacity for pleasure, some cultivation of virtue, some devotion to others, and some ability to let go.
Most of us, however, will normally feel more strongly drawn toward one of these paradigms than toward the others. By recognizing that inclination, we gain a powerful tool for confronting the decisions ahead of us.
If I know, for example, that I value service to my family more highly than the pleasure of achievement, some common career decisions become easier to make.
Readings, resources, and ways to support the podcast are available in the show notes and at mlsatlow.com.
I welcome your questions and feedback.
Disclaimers
I used an AI chatbot that I trained to generate some of the text this post (I used AI only for light editing on the podcast itself). I take full responsibility for its contents. Also, for some of the Amazon links I may receive affiliate benefits for any purchases made through the provided links.