You could read this line and file it away as one of those quotable sixteenth-century one-liners that turn up on the internet with wildly varying attributions and no particular sourcing. But if you sit with it for a minute, Montaigne is describing something you already know from the inside. Something you probably did last Tuesday.
You lay in bed at some point in the past week and rehearsed a disaster. Maybe it was a work problem. Maybe it was a conversation you were dreading. Maybe it was a small pain in your body that you were quietly deciding was probably something serious. Whatever the shape of it was, you spent a real amount of time and a real amount of emotional energy inside a version of your life that hadn’t happened yet, and quite possibly wasn’t going to. You worried the situation from every angle. You imagined the fallout. You worked out what you’d say and what they’d say back. You lost sleep over it. And then, in most cases, the actual event either didn’t happen, or happened in a completely different form than the one you’d been preparing for, and the elaborate scenario you’d built in your head turned out to have been rehearsing a disaster that never arrived.
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That’s what Montaigne is naming. Not the terrible things that happened to him, which of course some did. The terrible things that didn’t. The ones he lived through anyway, in advance, in the private theatre of his own mind, and which ended up being just as vivid and just as costly as anything that actually took place in his life, even though the world outside had no record of them ever occurring at all.
Which is a strange feature of being human, when you think about it. The imagination that lets us plan, predict, and prepare is the same one that lets us live through catastrophes that will never arrive. There’s no clean way to have one without the other. The mind that’s capable of foreseeing a genuine threat and getting ready for it is also the mind that’s capable of foreseeing a completely fictional threat and burning through the same amount of physiological stress in preparing for that instead. Neither the body nor the nervous system can tell the difference. The heart rate goes up. The cortisol runs. The sleep gets bad. The relationships suffer. And in a large fraction of cases, the underlying event turns out to have been something the person’s own imagination invented in the middle of the night for reasons that made sense at the time and are hard to reconstruct in the morning.
You already know this if you’ve ever caught yourself, a week after a difficult meeting, trying to remember what you were so worried about the night before, and finding that you can’t. The specific shape of the dread has faded because the situation resolved either better than expected or in a completely different direction than the one you’d been preparing for. What remains is only the tired sense of having spent something you couldn’t afford to spend, on a preparation that turned out to be for the wrong emergency.
What Montaigne isn’t saying, and what’s worth being careful about, is that all worry is wasted. It obviously isn’t. Some of it produces useful action. Some of it points you at real problems you’d otherwise miss. The problem the line is naming is not that the anticipatory mind is broken. It’s that the anticipatory mind has a habit of running well past the point where its work is useful, and continuing to generate detailed dread about outcomes that either can’t be predicted, can’t be prevented, or can’t be affected by the amount of thinking you’re currently doing about them at three in the morning.
Once you start looking for it, you notice how much of ordinary interior life is taken up by this kind of pre-lived catastrophe. The email you’re worried about sending. The medical appointment you haven’t yet made. The conversation you know you’ll have to have eventually. The rejection you’re expecting. The loss you’re anticipating. Some of these will happen. Some won’t. What’s guaranteed, on Montaigne’s reading and on most of the introspective wisdom traditions that have followed him, is that if you live long enough, a considerable fraction of the emotional labour of your life will have been spent on situations that never actually materialised in the form you were dreading them in.
Which is not exactly comforting. It’s also not exactly meant to be. The line isn’t a self-help slogan. It’s a piece of honest observation about how a particular kind of mind works, from a man who spent thirty years cataloguing his own experience with more precision than almost anyone before or since. Montaigne isn’t telling you to stop worrying. He’s noticing, with a slightly wry tone that seems to have been characteristic, that a lot of what has been terrible in his life turned out to have been things his own mind put there.
Maybe the invitation, this week, is to notice the difference between the two kinds of terrible thing when they show up. The ones that are actually here, meaning the real situations you’re dealing with right now that will require your attention and your resources. And the ones that are being rehearsed. The ones that haven’t happened, that might not happen, that might happen in a completely different form, that might not be affected in any way by how much you think about them tonight.
The first kind gets your energy. That’s what it’s for. The second kind, if you can catch it early enough and see it for what it is, might not need quite the amount of time and worry you were about to give it. And a life spent noticing, gently and repeatedly, which of the two you’re currently dealing with might turn out to be, on Montaigne’s own account of his own experience, a smaller and lighter thing to live through than the version most of us have been quietly rehearsing our whole lives.
Kiran Athar writes about the ordinary corners of a life examined slowly.
