A solution to our distress and agitation lies in a curious area: with a philosophy of pessimism. Rather than adjust our ideas of what existence is like, we shift our hopes to the future.Ĥ. It was just that we were momentarily and unusually unlucky. We console ourselves with an apparently reasonable thought: the reason why something didn’t work out this time had nothing to do with expectations. Strangely, even when we’ve had pretty disappointing experiences, we usually don’t lose faith in our expectations. Every one of our hopes, so innocently and mysteriously formed, opens us up to a vast terrain of agitation.ģ. We are enraged because somewhere in our minds, we have a perilous faith in a world in which car keys simply never go astray and partners show no vengeance when they have been abandoned for a few days. Yet, when we can’t find the car keys (they’re always by the door, in the little drawer beneath the gloves) or our partner does not welcome us warmly after a trip, the reaction may be very different. When a problem has been factored into our expectations, calm is never endangered. There are plenty of things that don’t turn out as we’d like but don’t make us livid either. What drives us to fury are affronts to our expectations. It’s according to the tenor of our expectations that we will deem moments in our lives to be either enchanting or (more likely) profoundly mediocre and unfair.Ģ. They are always framing the way we interpret the events in our lives. But expectations have an enormous impact on how we respond to what happens to us. We may hardly even notice we’ve got such phantasms. We go around with mental pictures, lodged in our brains, of how things are supposed to go. We are creatures deeply marked by our expectations. Our lives are powerfully affected by a special quirk of the human mind, to which we rarely pay much attention. What follow are some of our favourite calming ideas.ġ. But agitation is always a mental phenomenon, it is a result of ideas – and a calm mindset therefore relies on having to hand a raft of calming ideas that can be called upon at moments of panic.ģ. We have unfortunate tendencies to look at agitation as something quasi-physical, as a bodily emanation and therefore as best addressed via physical mechanisms: baths, teas or walks.Ģ.
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