There has rarely been a better time than now for people who like to worry. We see multiple ghastly wars any one of which could lead to nuclear Armageddon, lurking plagues that could break out anywhere at any moment, a migration crisis, an environmental crisis, and, of course, the presidential election. Sales of gas masks, antibiotics, aspirins, concrete bunkers, security systems, tranquilizers, lucky charms and assault rifles have reached all-time highs.
Amateur or inadequate worriers drift through life, ignoring all these terrible threats. They don’t even worry about death and taxes and fret only occasionally about small matters like how to pay the electricity bill or when to change the cat litter.
But a first-class professional worrier will maintain a state of high anxiety twenty-four-seven, regardless of any real cause. When the daily news doesn’t provide enough material, he or she will resort to old standbys like electromagnetic fields, Radon gas, hurricanes, asbestos, asteroid strikes, global warming, and of course The Unknown. With the unknown, you never know.
Health is perhaps our most reliable source of anxiety. The suburban landscape is so crowded with hospitals and medical centers that the entire population must be sick. There are hundreds of pharmacies, each one an epicenter of anxiety. Behind the pharmacy counter shelves of medications stretch into the distance, suggesting that our medical problems and needs are infinite. No wonder there’s a T-shirt saying: “I used to be young and healthy, but now I have a favorite pharmacy.”
The truth is that most worrying is a waste of time because we always care about the right things. Life always delivers the unexpected. A good example came my way recently. At a busy junction close to home, with four-way stop signs, I had dutifully stopped and had just started again when an SUV ran the stop sign on the cross street at full speed, missing me by a few feet. I had time to see that the driver was busy with her phone and looked neither to the right nor left. You would assume that this driver was a person immune to anxiety, with no fear even of sudden death.
But no, she was wearing a COVID mask, obviously rating the risk of the virus inside her speeding car higher than the risk of catastrophic collision. For my part, at that moment, I was not worrying about COVID or distracted drivers, but something quite different. In other words, we were both worrying about the wrong things at the wrong time.
Fearing the unexpected is foolish because there is so much of it. Fatal accidents have been caused by everyday objects like toothpicks, vacuum cleaners, lobsters and paper clips. People have been impaled by flying beach umbrellas, blown up by exploding beer kegs, choked by fish bones, and swallowed up by unexpected holes in the ground. It’s reasonable to assume that none of the victims had been worrying about these things in advance.
Mark Twain, towards the end of his life: “I am an old man and have known many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
