It's Worse Than You Think⁠↗

We think of certain kinds of challenges as really hard when they are, in fact, completely impossible. And then we drive ourselves crazy trying to deal with them – thereby distracting and disempowering ourselves from tackling the real really hard things that make life worth living.

Or maybe your issue is feeling anxious about what the future holds, in your life or the world at large. You feel as though you need to engage in constant planning, or reassurance-seeking from others, or some other form of psychological self-defence, in order to cushion yourself from the worst of the uncertainty. But it’s worse than you think! In fact, anything could happen at any moment. The future is always entirely uncertain. And while planning has its uses, it will never do the slightest thing to alter what the spiritual author Robert Saltzman calls your “total vulnerability to events.”

Imposter syndrome? Worse than you think – because you think the issue is that you don’t yet have the qualifications to hold your own among your colleagues, when in fact the truth is that everyone is winging it, all the time, and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’re going to have to do it in a state of unreadiness.

I love the psychotherapist Bruce Tift’s wry observation that he no longer experiences any problems in his marriage – but only because he no longer defines “the experience of emotional disturbance” as a problem.

when you grasp the sense in which your situation is completely hopeless, instead of just very challenging, you can unclench. You get to exhale. You no longer have to go through life adopting the brace position, because you see that the plane has already crashed. You’re already stranded on the desert island, making what you can of life with your fellow survivors, and with nothing but airplane food to subsist on. And you come to appreciate how much of your distress arose not from the situation itself, but from your efforts to hold yourself back from it, to keep alive the hope that it might not be as it really was.

You get to live more intensely, because you’re no longer making your full participation in life dependent on reaching some standard – of productivity, of certainty about the future, of competence, etcetera – that you were never going to reach in the first place.