Fears, Imagined #024

Hello, and welcome back to Every Dawn. This is the series which I'm making on my holiday. You can tell we are outdoors; we are in Greece. You can hear the cicadas, and perhaps see the beautiful sunset.

We are at the sea. We have been swimming. It is a great holiday despite the fact that I caught a cold, which I told you about yesterday. But there is one more thing that I always notice on this holiday, and I thought it would be worth talking about. Every time before we leave to come here, when we are still in Hong Kong and we're thinking about coming to Greece—because we always come to Greece, I have a house here, I have relations here—so there is no much reason to go anywhere else.

But every time we think of coming here, I always think of this flight. In my mind, the flight to come here is always horrible. There is this long, 17-hour flight; sometimes it's a little less, sometimes a little more. And I really hate a 17-hour flight—I mean, who doesn't, in economy class? And I imagine how horrible it will be, how much my legs will hurt, how much all my bones will hurt after a while, how little one can sleep despite the fact that one has nothing else to do, but the seats are so uncomfortable, they are so narrow that you cannot really sleep very well.

Often, the guy in front is coming all the way back and sitting on your lap. So, this is always a horrible experience, and I'm thinking about this for months before the flight, and I'm dreading the moment when I have to go on the plane. I'm not afraid of planes; it's just the total discomfort of having 17 hours sitting on a seat that is too narrow, and where people are harassing you right and left, and you cannot get up, you cannot get out, you cannot do anything else—you just have to stay there for 17 hours.

But now comes the surprising thing: every single time after we arrive, I feel that it was much better than I thought. It was much easier, it was much more comfortable, it was much more pleasant than I thought it would be. And none of that happened—I didn't have trouble falling asleep, my legs did not hurt, the guy in front did not come back with his seat and sit in my lap. All these things I had just been imagining — they were not real.

So in reality, the experience is never as bad, and it's almost pleasant. And every time I'm pleasantly surprised because, in my mind, I created this vision of horrible events happening, and then none of this actually happens.

I think this is something we tend to do more generally, or at least some people, perhaps some people like me, tend to do this more generally. I don't know if you do it, but for example, also when I stopped smoking—I was smoking for many years, for like 15 or 20 years, and then I stopped smoking. Now this is another 20 years back—well, more, 30 years back.

But when I was still smoking, and I was imagining how it would be not to smoke, how it would be to stop smoking, I always imagined that it would be so horrible. After the first hour, even after the first two hours, after the first three hours without a cigarette, I would be almost dying of the wish to smoke, and it would never get better, it would get worse and worse and worse, and I would suffer horribly. And this is what kept me from ever trying. For 20 years I was smoking because I could never bring myself to stop because I was afraid of this effect.

And it was similar to the plane, right? It is the same effect; it is my imagination creating these horrors, and in the end, when I did quit smoking, I was pleasantly surprised at how relatively easy it was. I mean, it was still a struggle, but it was not that epic pain that I had envisioned. It was a struggle for a few months, it was, you know, the wish to smoke occasionally, and then I had to be a little brave and suppress it, but it wasn't this never-ending pain and suffering that I had envisioned.

And so, this is how I think sometimes we are, you know, boycotting ourselves with our imaginations, especially people who have a lively imagination like me. You know, I'm writing, I'm doing all kinds of things, I'm making up stories, I'm telling you these stories now on video which are not made up, but still, I mean, I'm somebody whose world is very much in the mind and in the imagination. And perhaps many of you are like this, and we tend to sometimes harm ourselves by being too imaginative about negative results, imagining them as too vivid, too strong, which keeps us from actually trying things.

And often, people with a more practical mindset, who are a little less imaginative, actually have an advantage because they just go and do something without first thinking of all the horrors that this might entail.

So, perhaps for today, as a little thought, you may try to see where in your everyday life, even your imagination might tempt you to not try something because you think that it will be bad or it will be more difficult than it actually is. And perhaps you should try it anyway and surprise yourself, and get used to the idea that you may be boycotting yourself more than it is actually worth.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.