If You’re Not Worried, You’re Dead
To be alive is to solve problems — both real and imagined
Lately one of my favorite leisure activities is to lie awake for several hours worrying about everything that is wrong with my life, which, currently, is almost everything. I like to set aside some time each day for this pastime — from, say, midnight ’til two or three in the morning. I reminisce about things I did in the past that I wish I had not done, and things I did not do that I wish I had. I like to visualize unpleasant things that are going to happen to me in the near and distant future, from having to move at the end of the month to my own death.
I happen to be going through an unusually stressful time in my life right now, but I understand that my late-night worrying is a common, even popular hobby. My mother does the same thing. One difference between my mother and me is that she is currently 83, her personal finances have been taken out of her hands, and she lives in an assisted-living facility with a personal aide 12 hours a day, and so has no actual practical problems at all, except for Parkinson’s Disease and old age. Among Parkinson’s symptoms are dementia, delirium, and paranoia, so in lieu of real problems my mom has a lot of imaginary ones, which she worries about incessantly. Lately her idée fixe is that she has made a killing in imaginary…
