For the month of September, we are reprising one of Chuck’s most popular Prokopton Letter series, The Backseat Drivers. This is the third of four.
You are driving along smoothly. Suddenly, you are startled because your backseat screamer shouts, “Watch out! You are too close to the car ahead of you!” You react and jam on the brakes, only to realize that your backseat driver overreacted. You are alright for a while, and the backseat driver screams again, “Someone is tailgating you. Step on it!” You immediately try to go faster. Then you notice no one is really tailgating you. The more you listen to your backseat driver, the more likely it is that your driving will be erratic.
What’s happening?
Instead of paying attention to our driving, we start paying attention to our backseat driver. Instead of fearing what we should fear (driving improperly), we fear what we shouldn’t. This is the nature of our fears, the source of our cowardice.
Excess pushes us to want everything in sight. Cowardice does the opposite—making us fearful. As a result, we fear what we shouldn’t fear and don’t fear what we should fear. Fear is not knowing,
…what is terrible and we should be afraid of, what is not terrible, and we should not be afraid of, and what is neither. — Stobaeus450, Book 2, 5b1
There are things in life we should be afraid of, and there are other things we should not be afraid of. But our backseat driver randomly cries out, “You are going to get into an accident. Change lanes!” and we obey that. Our backseat driver then cries out, “You can avoid getting stuck if you go fast. Go fast,” and we obey that. We are afraid to challenge our backseat driver’s fearful reactions to things.
To ignore the backseat driver, we should be clear in our minds about what is terrible that we should be afraid of and what is not terrible we shouldn’t be afraid of.
Consider thoughts like these that pass through our minds:
I am worried about getting oldI am afraid to dieI am concerned about getting into an accidentIt would be terrible if I lost my jobI am concerned about developing health problemsMy coworker is working against meThis might ruin my reputation
Our backseat driver is urging us to be afraid of all such things. Which ones should we consider terrible and be afraid of? According to the Stoics, none of these is terrible, and we should not fear them. Why? Because they are externals and beyond our control. External things that are beyond our control are nothing to us. We should not fear them because we have no role in creating them, and we can do nothing about them. These are the givens of our lives when they happen to us. They are cards dealt to us in the poker game of life. Our job is not to fear them but to use them to win. If we fear them, we are defeated before the game starts.
A good player does not go into a game fearing what they might have to face. Rather, they get into the game expecting to win with their skill, no matter what is handed to them. If they are fearful of what is handed to them, they are likely to lose the game.
Epictetus was born a slave but was freed. The Emperor threw him out of Rome, and he went to Greece and taught Stoicism there. What happened did not matter to him. He always found a way not to be defeated by it.
The same is true of life. If we keep fearing what might happen in the future, even though we can do nothing about it, we will not be effective when we face it. Our focus will be on our fear rather than how to deal with what is in front of us.
When the backseat driver screams, “Watch out, danger!” let’s pause for a minute and ask ourselves, “Is it within my power to stop the thing that I am supposed to be afraid of?” If the answer is no, there is nothing to fear because you can do nothing about it.
But what if it happens? Listen to our favourite emperor:
Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and various troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself, in each present circumstance, what is there in this that is unendurable and beyond bearing? For you will be ashamed to confess. Next, remember that neither the future nor the past pains you, but only the present. — Marcus Aurelius,Meditations 8.36
Why are we so concerned about the future? It is mostly because we think that, unless we worry about it constantly, we won’t be able to cope with it later. We don’t realize we have been dealing with unexpected situations all our lives. We can cope with whatever comes our way.
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. — Marcus Aurelius,Meditations 7.8
Never fear what may happen in the future if you can do nothing about it now. Seneca’s goes a step further:
Others may say perhaps the worst will not happen. You yourself must say. Well, what if it does happen? Let us see who wins! — Seneca,Moral Letters 26
When you apply this rule, you will see most of your fears disappear.
When you play poker, your success depends much less on the cards you’re dealt than on the way you play. A good hand played badly can lose, and a bad hand played well can win. In life, our character is revealed by how we play our cards.
What matters in life is not what happens to us but how we respond to it, our judgments. Judging things correctly is under our control, and we should be concerned about our misjudgments: how we judge impressions. Are our judgments in accordance with reason, or do we go with our first impressions without examining them? Our misjudgments can cause us to harm others. Even more importantly, they can harm us. So we should consider them terrible and fear them. In every fearful situation, you should ask yourself,
Is my judgment on this the right one? Is there another way of looking at it?
Here is an example. Let the situation be one where you can control your response. Suppose a friend says something casually to you that hurts your feelings. You feel she is harbouring an unspoken resentment against you, and your friendship is at risk. This is your impression. If you accept that impression as true, your fear will grow. Your fear probably turns into anger, and you will say something to her, which will make the situation worse. This can disturb your and your friend’s tranquillity. Now, both will be upset with each other.
Instead, suppose you pause for a minute and examine your impression. Is your impression correct? Is it the only way to look at it? Consider some alternatives.
Your friend was careless in her remarks. She wasn’t trying to insult you.
Your friend had a lot of things on her mind and wasn’t paying much attention to what she was saying.
She did say something negative, but that was in response to what you said earlier.
She did say something to hurt you, but haven’t you said things that hurt others? Isn’t it better to let it go than to escalate the situation?
You will see that getting afraid and becoming fearful of the consequences is only one of the many choices you have in front of you. When you react thoughtlessly to a situation, you are taking instructions from your backseat driver.
So, what we should not fear in life is what happens to us. What we should fear is our weakness of character in responding to it properly.
In reality, most of us do the opposite. We are afraid of things that we don’t control and, therefore, are nothing to us*—*such as illness, death, poverty, losing reputation, etc. We fail to be afraid of things like judging our impressions properly, which are under our control. We lose the fearlessness that comes from controlling what is under our control and become fearful of things that we cannot possibly control. We let our backseat driver control us. As Epictetus says,
What do we fear? Externals. What do we spend our energies on? ExternalsDiscourses 2.16
Is it any wonder then that we are in fear and distress? — Epictetus,
When we realize this, we are not afraid of or averse to anything happening. We are not anxious about tomorrow. We are not worried about what the future may bring. We know anything can happen to us. We cannot control it. But our character and how we respond to things—this we can control. Once we realize this, we give up fearing anything, but instead, we spend our time building our character, which will help us face anything that may happen.
There are some things in our life we should fear, and there are other things in life we shouldn’t fear.
Things we should not fear are externals: What has already happened and what might happen in the future. We can handle them when we face them. We should not be afraid of them since it serves no purpose.
We should be afraid of our wrong judgments and how we judge our impressions. These are the building blocks of our character, and we should pay attention to our character and our responses.
List all things that you are averse to and afraid of—things you don’t want in your life now or in the future. Once you have made a complete list, go over the items one by one. Is it within your power to do something about it? Is yes, what is there to fear? If no, why be anxious about it?
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