13: Stoic Advice For The Anxious

     My career transition has been more anxiety-provoking than I had expected. Readers of this blog may recall that I took early retirement last year, after twenty-two years with the same organization (during which time I did have several different jobs, yet twenty-two years is a long time to spend with one employer, especially in the modern economy). As a contract attorney, I have already had three different jobs in only three months. I expect that I will become accustomed to this new reality sooner rather than later, but it has been a major change for a creature of habit such as myself.
     In his thirteenth letter to Lucilius, Seneca addresses his friend's struggle to achieve tranquility:
          "'How am I to know,' you say, 'whether the causes of my anxiety are real or empty?' Here is your measuring stick. We are tormented either by things past, or by things to come, or both. Concerning things present it is easy to make a judgment: if your body is at liberty, and healthy, if you are not in pain from any injury, then we can wait and see what is to come; today is not an issue. 'Still, it is to come.' First, find out whether there is firm evidence that trouble is on the way. For all too often we worry about what we merely suspect. Rumor plays tricks on us ... . Yes, dear Lucilius, we are too quick to give way to opinion. We do not demand evidence of the things that frighten us, or check them out carefully; we quail, and take to our heels, like the army that breaks camp because of a dust cloud kicked up by a herd of cattle, or like people who are terrified by an anonymous item of gossip. In a way, empty causes produce even more trepidation. Real dangers have an inherent limit; anything that arises from uncertainty, though, is given over to conjecture and to unrestrained anxiety. Hence our most pernicious, our most uncontrollable fears are the crazy ones. Our other fears are unreasonable; these are unreasoning. So let us look carefully at the facts." 
     In retrospect, my own fear of being permanently unemployed was unreasoning rather than evidence-based. It did take me six months to find a new job. However, I now realize that I could have cut my search time in half by starting with current technology -- Indeed.com ultimately worked for me -- instead of relying on traditional job hunting methods (such as "networking").
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      Seneca, Letters on Ethics to Lucilius, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Margaret Graver and A.A. Long (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2015), Letter 13, 7-9, pages 53-54.