We can’t control what disasters a new year may bring. Stoicism can help us get up and try again
Iam 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