As the Christmas week stretches towards 2023, I mull over how the act of thinking about our future can cause us to feel such a vast range of nuanced emotions; and so often turns to worry. Some of this is culturally driven. For example, take a look at the cover of the upcoming January edition of The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine), featuring a provocative trompe l’oeil cover entitled “Notes from the Apocalypse”. Playing on our deepest concerns, from the winter’s climate crisis, the rise of weird and dangerous politicians, and even the end of humanity as we know it, who wouldn’t fret? Now, the Stoics knew that life can throw us around and that it wasn’t always pretty. They had antidotes for such treacherous moments when our own imagination and courage take us to dark, spooky places in our heads. They practiced Memento Mori, Reverse Clause, reverse visualizations, and even PreMeditatio Malorum, to get prepared for whatever comes.
A modern approach can also help us face our own Future UnEasiness: the Feeling Wheel (Feelings Wheel). Created originally by Robert Plutchik (1980), and modified by various authors, the wheel organizes 72 feelings into a colorful pie chart and buckets them into core groups, such as sad, bad, mad, disgusted, scared, joyful, powerful, and peaceful. Moving outward from the inside core groups, two more granular levels of emotions align to the core feeling….such as remorse may be connected to guilt which leads to sadness. Happiness may actually be optimism which is felt as inspiration. Why would we want to identify and label our emotional states more precisely? Because by doing so, we shift to our cerebral cortex rather than our limbic system but more importantly, we can then address the real emotion with more accurate actions. Stoically, we can replace our named but false impressions with more accurate and positive interpretations of what we are facing. And this too, helps us prepare for whatever comes.
So, whether you use a contemporary tool for your future gazing or an ancient one, we wish you a tremendous, productive, emotionally accurate, and flourishing 2023. Amor Fati!
With gratitude and respect,
Todd, Derrick, Kathryn