We suffer more often in imagination than in reality

It was Seneca who said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”. Seneca’s quote shouldn’t need much explaining — we’re all experts at using our imagination to make ourselves suffer.

From an evolutionary perspective, it’s easy to understand why mental suffering is useful. Being worried about not having enough food is a good thing. If we were relaxed about life-threatening situations then we wouldn’t have lasted long as a species.

Fast-forward to the present day and all our survival needs are taken care of — our worrying that once kept us alive now raises our blood pressure for no good reason.

I’m conscious that many people struggle to make ends meet or have other genuine problems to contend with. With that being said, there’s many of us that don’t have a good reason to regularly subject ourselves to mental suffering — I’d put myself into that category.

What is suffering?

When looking up the definition of suffering in the Oxford Dictionary three themes recur: pain, distress, and hardship.

More often than not, when we subject ourselves to mental anguish it’s not a distressing event, and the worry we undertake isn’t helping us evade pain or hardship. Comparative to our ancestors, life is a cakewalk. Ever since our survival needs were taken care of — none of us have anything “real” to do which is probably the explanation for why so many of us search for purpose in life.

With no real problems we “move the goalposts” and torture ourselves for no good reason. In psychology, this is a phenomenon called “prevalence-induced concept change”. According to Harvard researcher, Daniel Gilbert “When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it”. This means however rich or easy your life becomes — you will likely worry just as much or possibly even more.

I spoke with a neighbour recently who was distressed by the fact her window cleaner had “missed a spot”. She wouldn’t stop talking about it and was clearly agitated. Likewise, I know someone who’s incredibly wealthy but is constantly stressed about money. His latest “problem” concerns a tenant who hasn’t paid him rent. Needless to say, this doesn’t affect his lifestyle in the slightest but he channels all of his “worrying energy” into this one concern as it’s his only problem right now.

When did you last suffer?

Ask yourself this — when was the last time you suffered? I don’t mean modern-day suffering such as being stuck in traffic, receiving no “likes”, or an Amazon delivery turning up late. I mean real suffering.

I reflected on this question after my mum passed away earlier in the year. This distressing event made me realise that this was the only real suffering I had encountered which means there is a major asymmetry in the amount of worrying I do compared to distressing events I have encountered. Most of my other worries have been memeable “first world problems”. Or put another way: prevalence-induced concept change (the psychological phenomenon we all suffer from) has me confused about what’s worth worrying about.

Suffering at work

The stress from the jobs we do must be the biggest cause of our imaginary suffering. If you’re a doctor, soldier or airline pilot then stress can be useful for focusing the mind on the task at hand.

Many of us don’t have “real jobs” though — many modern-day jobs don’t serve much (if any) purpose. You would think that these unproductive “paper shuffling“ jobs are stress-free, however, the irony is that they’re ladened with mental suffering. My experience suggests that more pointlessness comes with more stress; a respondent from the book Bullshit Jobs highlights this with an example that I’m sure many can relate to.

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

The amount of workplace aggression and stress I see in people is inversely correlated with the importance of the work they’re doing: “The client’s going fucking apeshit because they’re under pressure from their boss to get this presentation ready for the Q3 planning meeting on Monday! They’re threatening to cancel the entire fucking contract unless we get it delivered by tomorrow morning! We’re all going to need to stay late to finish it!” This is typical for bullshit reports.

I know two people who had heart attacks from the company where I previously worked. Both of them put it down to work-related stress. I can say with 100% certainty that the work they did was meaningless. They certainly weren’t saving lives — I doubt the PowerPoint reports they slaved over were even being read.

When I was working there, I rarely had much to do and managed to avoid most of the “fire drills”. Even so, there was underlying stress caused by doing something I didn’t enjoy, not being free and the terrible daily commute.

One noticeable difference I’ve observed since being fired is how much better I sleep. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly no Zen master — I continue to subject myself to imaginary suffering but it’s significantly less compared to when I did pointless work in an office. My days feel somewhat more meaningful now, and life no longer feels like it’s being wasted away.

Now that I think about it: the mental suffering I encountered when working in an office was useful — without it, I wouldn’t have made a change.