Bear this in mind as you follow the news in the coming months: no matter how terrible reality is, it can’t be as infinitely bad as you feared

‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies,” Gore Vidal remarked memorably, perhaps riffing on a quotation usually attributed to Somerset Maugham: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” But an intriguing recent study suggests that the mere prospect of a friend succeeding might be worse: researchers found that we reliably feel more envy toward things people are due to enjoy in future – professional accolades, dream holidays, dream dates – than when they’ve already enjoyed them. In real life, of course, that’s partly because the experience turns out to be rubbish. Here, though, it was the simple fact that it was no longer in the future: once the Caribbean scuba-diving holiday is happening, or the promotion has been achieved, previously seething onlookers largely stop caring (and, presumably, move on to envying whoever’s due for a holiday next month).

Which seems odd: isn’t the whole point of envy that you want what others have, rather than what they’ll later have? But there’s a broader psychological truth revealed here, which is that the future is often more tormenting than the past, just because it’s open-ended. That’s most obvious in the case of worry: worrisome future events are rarely quite so anxiety-inducing once they’re unfolding, and nobody worries about them once they’ve happened. It’s the same with envy: the possibility of my friend’s new book becoming an acclaimed bestseller allows my imagination to range freely over every potential enviable outcome, but once the possibility becomes reality – even if it’s truly spectacular – it’s finite and concrete. I can get my mind around it, adapt to it, perhaps even take pleasure from it. (I said perhaps.)

It’s striking, actually, how often in life the problem isn’t the problem, but a lack of clarity about it – a lack of hard edges that prevents you from ever quite seizing hold of it. That’s why it feels liberating, in the midst of overwhelm, to make a list, even before you’ve completed a single item on it. It’s also the rationale behind the saying that you regret the things you don’t do more than those you do: you can reconcile yourself to bad exes, or foolish career moves, but not to the loss of the endlessly proliferating parallel lives you might have lived if you’d seized more opportunities. It’s why “writer’s block” is often a matter of not being clear about what you want to say, rather than some mysterious difficulty in saying it.

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It’s also why virtually every personal finance guru recommends, as a first step, getting a clear picture of your income and expenses, assets and debts, even if this requires getting over an initial hump of fear – because you can deal with any real situation more effectively than one in which you’ve no idea what you’re going to be dealing with.

All of which suggests a useful question to ask when confronting any stressful problem: are you sure you know what the problem is, or is some of that stress the result of an inner flinch, a psychological recoil from facing the truth? Because no matter how terrible reality is – and this might be worth bearing in mind as you follow the news headlines in the coming months and years – it can’t, by definition, be as infinitely bad as you were fearing.

Read this

Julien Smith’s short book The Flinch is a helpful guide to pushing past the instinctive fears that get in the way of doing what matters.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com