“Hecato says, ‘cease to hope and you will cease to fear.’… The primary cause of both these ills is that instead of adapting ourselves to present circumstances we send out thoughts too far ahead.”
SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 5.7b-8
The explanation of today’s quote from The Daily Stoic is a little hard to stomach, because it paints hope as something we should avoid as much as fear. I’ll explain the point in a moment, but avoiding hope just runs counter to everything we’ve always been taught, and that’s difficult to accept, isn’t it? So I don’t agree with Holiday’s title for today which is “Hope and Fear Are the Same”, but I do think there is some nuanced truth here.
In effect, both hope and fear represent ‘living in the future’. As Seneca put it, they’re both “sending out thoughts too far ahead”. And that’s not where we want our thinking to be. Instead, we should be living in the present — and letting the future take care of itself and embracing that inevitability via our belief in amor fati.
Whether we’re hoping for outcomes we can’t influence, or fearing certain events which are equally out of our control — in both cases we are filling ourselves with desire for things in the future. And when we fill our hearts with desire and want, then our happiness is reduced. And we end up focusing on things which are out of our control rather than what’s right in front of us.
Hope always contains a certain amount of worry — by definition. We’re worried that the thing we’re hoping for won’t come true. And worry is of course a type of fear, and essentially putting a down payment on misery. So you can see the connection between hope and fear. And as strange as it might seem, we’re probably better off doing neither, and focusing on the present moment instead, and that which is within our control.
