Hope And Fear Are The Same

November 16th, 2021

Hecato says, ‘cease to hope and you will cease to fear.’ … The primary cause of both these ills is that instead of adapting ourselves to present circumstances we send out thoughts too far ahead.

- Seneca in Moral Letters, 5.7b-8

What a fantastic read for today. When thinking of hope and fear, we often think of hope as a positive and fear as a negative. The Stoic Hecato of Rhodes pined that hope and fear are one of the same in the sense that they are projections into the future about things that we do not control.

As the authors of "The Daily Stoic" eloquently state, "Both are the enemy of this present moment that you are actually in."

Conclusion

Hope and fear are what we make them. Hope and fear can contain a large amount of want. The longer we continue to hope the more we begin to worry and this is where the danger lies.