You’ve endured countless troubles—all from not letting your ruling reason do the work it was made for—enough already!
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.26
How many things you fear have actually come to pass? How many times has anxiety driven you to behave in a way you later regret? How many times have you let jealousy or frustration or greed lead you down a bad road?
Letting our reason rule the day might seem like more work, but it saves quite a bit of trouble. As Ben Franklin‘s proverb put it! “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Your brain was designed to do this work. It was meant to separate what is important from what is senseless, to keep things in perspective, to only become troubled by that which is worth becoming troubled about. You only need to put it to use.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman