On the weight of imagined troubles
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Most of what frightens us has not happened. Seneca noticed that the mind, left unattended, rehearses catastrophes with an artist's devotion — sketching losses, arguments and failures in vivid detail, then living through each one as if it were real.
The suffering is genuine; only its cause is fictional. To see a worry clearly is to notice how much of it is scaffolding we built ourselves — and may quietly take down.