I am a worrier. Long before I read about the stoics, I tended to begin my days with what they call a premeditatio malorum – a rumination on all the very worst things that could happen in the next 24 hours. These days, I achieve the same effect by logging on to Twitter (or X, as nobody but Elon Musk will ever call it).
To exist in the age of globalised social media is to wake up to the news that the worst has happened somewhere and, somehow, it’s your fault. Looking ahead to 2024, the thought of 365 more days of the worst possible happenings actually happening – and my being somehow complicit, if only as witness – doesn’t exactly fill me with festive cheer.
What is the worst 2024 could offer? Another summer of devastating bushfires? A global conflict spiralling out of control from one of the many devastating battlefronts? A Trump re-election? Compared with another four of years of the tangerine tyrant, an asteroid strike starts to look like soothing anaesthesia.
There is a sense – encouraged by the intimate nature of social media – that great geopolitical problems are ours as individuals to carry or even solve. Most of the outrage that defines our online lives is, by and large, an expression of helplessness.
Along with helplessness comes the guilt. Because as devastating as global events can be to witness, let alone experience, most of our anxieties about the coming year will concern much smaller things: The thought of losing our jobs. Rising grocery prices. Making rent or mortgage payments. The health of our families. Will the Matildas qualify for the Olympics?
We call some of these first-world problems because we feel guilty that our own small lives can seem all-consuming even while the world burns around us. But times of crisis can force us to pull focus back to the small things that our lives are made from. In the face of losing everything, what is most important becomes excruciatingly clear. Sweating the small stuff isn’t wasted effort but rather an antidote to the helplessness we feel in the face of grim news. Maybe, come January, we should resolve to stop feeling guilty that our own lives matter to us.
This past year, I’ve found the incomprehensible scale of global disaster has helped me treasure the modest trappings of an ordinary life. Once profoundly antisocial, I have become more eager to chat at the school gate and dog park, happier to become more involved in community gardens and sporting groups.
Epictetus, a former slave and one of the founders of stoicism, argued that the chief task in life is to work out what we can and can’t control in our lives. The real purpose of the premeditatio is not to deaden us to the horrors of the future, but rather to help us identify what is truly within our reach. We find meaning in coming to terms with the choices we can make that might actually change our world – or, at least, how we live in it.
Pulling focus from the global to the local is a chance to turn our urge to make the world better towards those who can actually benefit from it – namely, all those other small and utterly insignificant people that surround us.
If I can’t manage global peace this year, maybe I can still help raise money for a new playground or grow some half-decent rhubarb. Maybe I can be more patient with the kids or listen better to a friend in trauma.
There’s a reason stoicism has had a revival in recent years. The lesson from the stoics isn’t to abandon hope, but not to be destroyed by failure. Those who want to make a change in the world need to be ready to always try again.
This is good news for those of us who campaigned this year for change that didn’t happen. Those of us who marched for a peace that still isn’t won. Those who raised voices the world isn’t yet ready to hear.
We can’t control what 2024 will visit upon us, but we can try to make sure we are ready to survive it. This doesn’t have to mean stocking up the larder in our log cabin retreat or, for that matter, switching off the news. Yes, the year ahead might be packed with horrors as yet unimaginable. By preparing for the worst, we can still live in our hope that our actions – however small – might help make it better.
Myke Bartlett is a writer and critic
