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Key points
- Worldviews are assumptions about the world that can protect us against crippling distress.
- The ancient Stoic philosophers gave us a playbook for constructing protective worldviews.
- Stoic philosophy replete with its assumptive worldviews serves as the foundation of cognitive therapy.
For 40 years I’ve lived in a professional world of hyper-achievement. I’ve had the privilege of observing, working with, and teaching many of “the best of the best” in their respective professions. During a recent podcast aimed at this audience, I was asked what I had seen from the last year that might help such an audience better prepare for and be resilient in the wake of future adversities—the next “big one” so to speak, especially the next pandemic.
George Santayana once said that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. Futurist Alvin Toffler, as a corollary, declared those who fail to shape the future will be forced to endure it. While no recurrence of the Chicxulub asteroid is expected, another pandemic seems inevitable to occur in the next ten years. Other global disasters are likely as well. So how do we best prepare? How do we best cope? To find the answer, let us turn our attention away from controlling the instrumental actions Santayana and Toffler had in mind; rather, let us focus on the things over which we have the most control, our thoughts and our emotions.
Your Worldview: It’s All About the Journey
The founder of American psychology, William James, asserted that one's worldview played perhaps the most critical role in defining one's psychological health. A worldview may be thought of as a set of assumptions about the world and the role we play in it.
Worldviews are sometimes expressed as aphorisms. The aphorism “life is a journey, not a destination” first appeared in the 1920s in a theological context. Secularly, Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted, “To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”
Wisdom, therefore, dictates we best prepare for the adversities of the future by shifting our focus from our addiction to defining our self-worth by external factors such as the number of “likes” we get on social media, by the personal or professional “destinations” (accomplishments) we achieve, or the amount of money we accrue, to the process which envelopes all of those things, that is, the journey of life itself.
In that sense, the journey becomes a galvanizing and protective worldview. We learn the journey of life is an ongoing process, not a series of goals or even a series of quests defined by a beginning and an end. By embracing this notion, we resist the tendency to define our lives by our destinations (accomplishments). In so doing, the concept of “failure” is eliminated. There simply is no such thing as failure, only a journey replete with milestones that can serve to teach and even redirect. Thus, adversity, even catastrophe, may shape the journey but never define it. Never let it define you. The past is a very poor predictor of the future, unless we allow it to be.
Self-talk Fuels the Journey
The Stoic philosophers can help us navigate the journey of life, replete with its highs and its lows. They argue, regardless of what we experience, that people are not disturbed by things but rather by what we say to ourselves about those things. The power of “self-talk” is well-documented in research supporting cognitive therapy. Remembering five simple maxims can be useful, and help immunize us against crippling distress.
- “Anything worth having is worth failing for.”
- “That which does not destroy me makes me stronger.”
- “Failure is not the lack of accomplishment, rather failure resides in ceasing to continue the journey.”
- “The most valuable worth I can possess lies beyond wealth.”
- “Life is a journey, not a destination; there is no such thing as failure.”
By focusing on our journey, we take back the control of our lives we once surrendered to the destinations and the adversities.
