“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”Michel de Montaigne · Eseuri · 1580 · Eseuri, Cartea III, cap. 12
Imagined suffering is often more painful than real suffering.
Montaigne observes the mind's tendency to anticipate disasters. We torture ourselves with catastrophic scenarios that never materialize. The mechanism is simple: fear and anxiety create fictional misfortunes more painful than real ones. An example: someone postpones a difficult conversation, imagining terrible reactions, when in reality everything resolves easily.
Montaigne does not claim that real suffering does not exist. He points to an inner mechanism: the mind amplifies or invents pains that have no basis in facts. When you lie awake at night unable to sleep because you imagine how a project will fail, you suffer from something that has not yet happened. This imagined suffering can be more intense than any real failure. A simple exercise can help: briefly describe what actually happened, without interpretations. You will see that reality is almost always milder than the scenario in your mind. The next step is to understand why the mind does this.
Why it matters It helps us recognize when we suffer from our own mental stories, not from reality. We can reduce anxiety by asking: 'What actually happened?'