How Not To Worry: A 1934 Guide to Mastering Life

"We must gain victory, not by assaulting the walls, but by accepting them."

As far as vintage finds go, they hardly get more fortuitous than You Can Master Life (public library) – a marvelous 1934 compendium of sort-of-philosophical, sort-of-self-helpy, at times charmingly dated, other times refreshingly timeless advice on cultivating "the power to think, to create, to influence and be influenced by others, and to love," in the spirit of the 1949 gem How To Avoid Work.

Though written by a Christian pastor named James Gordon Gilkey

and thus a little too God-heavy for these corners of the internet, the slim volume shares a good amount in common with Alain de Botton's modern-day advocacy of the secular sermon. Take, for instance, Gilkey's advice in a chapter titled "Breaking the Grip of Worry." He cites a "Worry Table" created by one of the era's humorists – most likely Mark Twain, who is often quoted, though never with a specific source, as having said, "I've had a lot of

worries in my life, most of which never happened." The table was designed to distinguish between justified and unjustified worries:

On studying his chronic fears this man found they fell into five fairly distinct classifications:

1. Worries about disasters which, as later events proved, never happened. About 40% of my anxieties.

2. Worries about decisions I had made in the past, decisions about which I could now of course do nothing. About 30% of my anxieties.

3. Worries about possible sickness and a possible nervous breakdown, neither of which materialized. About 12% of my worries.

4. Worries about my children and my friends, worries arising from the fact I forgot these people have an ordinary amount of common sense. About 10% of my worries.

5. Worries that have a real foundation. Possibly 8% of the total.

Gilkey then prescribes:

What, of this man, is the first step in the conquest of anxiety? It is to limit his worrying to the few perils in his fifth group.

This simple act will eliminate 92% of his fears. Or, to figure the matter differently, it will leave him free from worry 92% of the time.

The concept of the worry table is strikingly reminiscent – and, one has to wonder, might have inspired – artist Andrew Kuo's elaborate 2008 graphic My Wheel of Worry:

(Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald intuited the basic premise of the table when he sent his daughter Scottie an itemized list of the things in life to worry and not worry about.)

In a later chapter, titled "Doing One's Work Under Difficulties," Gilkey offers some related advice which, on the one hand, bears that wise Buddhist-like mindset of living with sheer awareness but, on the other, makes a questionable case against introspection and the enormous enrichment of "living the questions":

We should make ourselves stop trying to explain our own difficulties. Our first impulse is to try to account for them,

figure out why what has happened did happen. Sometimes such an effort is beneficial: more often it is distinctly harmful. It leads to introspection, self-pity, and vain regret; and almost invariably it creates within us a dangerous mood of confusion and despair. Many of life's hard situations cannot be explained. They can only be endured, mastered, ad gradually forgotten. Once we learn this truth, once we resolve to use all our energies managing life rather than trying to explain life, we take the first and most obvious step toward significant accomplishment.

In the following chapter, "Learning to Adjust," Gilkey revisits the subject through the lens of aging:

Only as we yield to the inexorable, only as we accept the situations which we find ourselves powerless to change, can

we free ourselves from fatal inward tensions, and acquire that inward quietness amid which we can seek – and usually find – ways by which our limitations can be made at least partially endurable.

[…]

Why is [this] so difficult for most people? because most of us were told in childhood that the way to conquer a difficulty is to fight it and demolish it. That theory is, of course, the one that should be taught to young people. Many of the difficulties we encounter in youth are not permanent; and the combination of a heroic courage, a resolute will, and a tireless persistence will often – probably usually – break them down. Bu tin later years the essential elements in the situation change. We find in our little world prison-walls which no amount of battering will demolish. Within those walls we must spend our day – spend them happily, or resentfully. Under these new circumstances we must deliberately reverse our youthful technique. We must gain victory, not by assaulting the walls, but by accepting them. Only when this surrender is made can

we assure ourselves of inward quietness, and locate the net step on the road to ultimate victory.

Complement You Can Master Life with a contemporary counterpart of sorts, the wonderful and wonderfully useful How To Stay Sane, then wash down with a verse-by-verse neuropsychology reading of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In a 1933 letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced this poignant and wise list of things to worry, not worry, and think about, found in the altogether excellent F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters:

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage

Worry about Cleanliness

Worry about efficiency

Worry about horsemanship

Worry about…

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion

Don’t worry about dolls

Don’t worry about the past

Don’t worry about the future

Don’t worry about growing up

Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you

Don’t worry about triumph

Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault

Don’t worry about mosquitoes

Don’t worry about flies

Don’t worry about insects in general

Don’t worry about parents

Don’t worry about boys

Don’t worry about disappointments

Don’t worry about pleasures

Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?

How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in

regard to:

(a) Scholarship

(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get

along with them?

(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I

neglecting it?

How To Stay Sane:

The Art of Revising Your Inner Storytelling by Maria Popova

“Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate,

fleeting impressions of everyday life.”

“[I] pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity,”

Jack Kerouac professed in discussing his

writing routine. But those of us who fall on

the more secular end of the spectrum might need a slightly more potent sanity-

preservation tool than prayer. That’s precisely

what writer and psychotherapist Philippa

Perry offers in How To Stay Sane (public

library; UK), part of The School of Life’s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional

self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy,

yet immensely helpful guides to modern living.

At the heart of Perry’s argument — in line with neurologist Oliver

Sacks’s recent meditation on memory and how “narrative truth,”

rather than “historical truth,” shapes our impression of the world — is

the recognition that stories make us human and learning to reframe

our interpretations of reality is key to our experience of life:

Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting

impressions of everyday life. They bring together the past and the

future into the present to provide us with structures for working

towards our goals. They give us a sense of identity and, most

importantly, serve to integrate the feelings of our right brain with the

language of our left.

[…]

We are primed to use stories. Part of our survival as a species

depended upon listening to the stories of our tribal elders as they

shared parables and passed down their experience and the wisdom

of those who went before. As we get older it is our short-term

memory that fades rather than our long-term memory. Perhaps we

have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger

generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us

which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to

thrive.

I worry, though, about what might happen to our minds if most of

the stories we hear are about greed, war and atrocity.

Perry goes on to cite research indicating that people who watch

television for more than four hours a day see themselves as far more

likely to fall victim in a violent incident in the forthcoming week than their peers who watch less than two hours a day. Just like E. B. White

advocated for the responsibility of the writer to “to lift people up, not

lower them down,” so too is our responsibility as the writers of our

own life-stories to avoid the well-documented negativity bias of

modern media — because, as artist Austin Kleon wisely put it, “you

are a mashup of what you let into your life.” Perry writes:

Be careful which stories you expose yourself to.

[…]

The meanings you find, and the stories you hear, will have an

impact on how optimistic you are: it’s how we evolved. … If you do

not know how to draw positive meaning from what happens in life,

the neural pathways you need to appreciate good news will never

fire up.

[…]

The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good

news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news.

Yet despite the adaptive optimism bias of the human brain, Perry

argues a positive outlook is a practice — and one that requires

mastering the art of vulnerability and increasing our essential

tolerance for uncertainty:

You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing

optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will

invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your

feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for

vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.

[…]

Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a

fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not

mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing

optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an

event than on the negative. … I am not advocating the kind of

optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running

at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to

sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and

grow into flowers.

Another key obstruction to our sanity is our chronic aversion to being wrong, entwined with our damaging fear of the unfamiliar. Perry

cautions:

We all like to think we keep an open mind and can change our

opinions in the light of new evidence, but most of us seem to be

geared to making up our minds very quickly. Then we process

further evidence not with an open mind but with a filter, only

acknowledging the evidence that backs up our original impression.

It is too easy for us to fall into the rap of believing that being right is

more important than being open to what might be.

If we practice detachment from our thoughts we learn to observe

them as though we are taking a bird’s eye view of our own thinking.

When we do this, we might find that our thinking belongs to an

older, and different, story to the one we are now living.

Perry concludes:

We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves

[and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface

content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter

through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus

regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck.

Complement How To Stay Sane with radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm

Reich’s 1948 list of the six rules for creative sanity.