Do you often find yourself imagining the worst possible outcome long before anything actually happens. Before you act, you start collecting reasons not to. You want to start the business, but what if it fails. You want to write a book, but what if no one reads it. You want to share an idea, publish that post, but there is always that pause where doubt steps in and fills the silence. It tells you to wait. To be realistic. To consider what other people might think. This habit feels personal, but it isn’t unique. It’s something most of us return to again and again, often without realizing it.

This is why I keep coming back to the same teachings from different angles. Seneca spoke directly to this nearly two thousand years ago when he wrote, “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” I don’t treat this as a quote. I see it as a teaching, because it points to something that hasn’t changed with time. We have always been skilled at hurting ourselves before life ever gets the chance. The real struggle has rarely been external. It has lived quietly in the space between thought and action.

I touched on this recently when writing about Marcus Aurelius, and the overlap matters. These thinkers weren’t repeating themselves because they lacked new ideas. They repeated themselves because humans do. We encounter the same internal obstacles at different stages of life, under different names. Fear shows up as caution. Doubt disguises itself as realism. Hesitation pretends to be wisdom. The teaching stays the same because the problem does.

Most of our suffering does not come from what actually happens. It comes from what we imagine might happen. We rehearse failure as if it’s inevitable. We imagine judgment before it exists. We assume silence means rejection and hesitation means inadequacy. By the time reality arrives, we are already discouraged, already drained, already halfway convinced we were never capable to begin with. The pain feels real because the mind experiences it as real, even though nothing has occurred yet.

This is where that familiar voice in the back of our heads becomes dangerous. The one that tells us we are not enough. Not talented enough, not consistent enough, not worthy of attention. It doesn’t shout. It whispers. It waits for quiet moments and fills them with doubt and comparison. It reminds us of past missteps while predicting future failures. And because it sounds like our own voice, we trust it. This teaching matters because it challenges that voice, not by arguing with it, but by exposing it. Much of what it says is imagination pretending to be reality.

I spoke about this recently on The Books By Josh Audio Immersion when I talked about writing when no one is reading. That episode wasn’t really about writing. It was about staying present when there is no external confirmation to quiet that inner critic. Writing into the silence forces you to confront the idea that your effort may go unnoticed for a while. That is when imagination tends to suffer the most. It fills the gap with conclusions. It tells you the silence means failure. That the lack of response is proof. That you should stop because it clearly isn’t working.

But reality is usually far less dramatic. Silence is not rejection. Slow progress is not incompetence. Being unseen for a season does not mean you were never meant to be seen. The suffering doesn’t come from the act of creating or showing up. It comes from the meaning we attach to the absence of immediate feedback. We decide what the moment means long before it has finished unfolding.

This teaching invites the same pause many of the others do. A pause between what we think and what is actually happening. Reality can be uncomfortable, but it is often manageable. Imagination, when left unchecked, is far less kind. It turns uncertainty into certainty of failure. It reframes patience as wasted time. It convinces us that stopping is safer than continuing, when stopping only guarantees the outcome we were trying to avoid.

That is why this teaching has endured. Not because it sounds wise, but because it remains accurate. If we can learn to notice when we are suffering in advance, when we are punishing ourselves for futures that do not exist yet, something shifts. We gain the ability to act anyway. To write anyway. To continue anyway. Not because fear disappears, but because we stop letting it speak first.

If this reflection feels familiar, that’s intentional. These ideas continue through my conversations on The Books By Josh Audio Immersion, and they also run quietly through my book A New Set of Eyes. Not as answers, but as perspectives. Ways of looking again at thoughts we’ve trusted for too long.

Sometimes what we need isn’t more confidence or louder motivation. Sometimes we just need to let reality speak before imagination decides for us.