We’re Cooked.

It happens at 12 am, when the ceiling turns into a screen. It happens on the drive to work, when the car makes a noise it didn’t make yesterday. It happens at dinner, while you nod along to a story you didn’t hear. It happens when you check your bank account, and again ten minutes later, like the number might have grown out of politeness.

You’re here, but you’re not. You’re in next month, dreading a future that hasn’t happened yet. Rent. Whether that girl you see at the gym will reject you when you approach her. The job you don’t have. The world, which now seems to end on a weekly subscription. So you tell yourself:

We’re cooked.

As someone who doesn’t want to disappoint their peers, you start everything. A business on Monday. An app on Wednesday. A get-rich-in-five-days seminar. Surely one of them blows up overnight and saves us. Overnight is a scam—ask anyone who’s been “almost there” for three years.

And the worry, now with five unfinished projects to feed on, gets fatter and juicier.

Paying the Bill Early

None of this is new. Two thousand years ago, Seneca wrote his friend Lucilius a letter about fear and opened it with a fighter—one who has seen his own blood, been dropped, and gets back up every time. Then he got to the point:

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”1

I train MMA. Getting dropped is a Tuesday for me. Getting dropped by a thought at 2 am? My record there is 0 and 47.

Some things, Seneca says, torment us before they should. That’s the bill. Worry pays for problems that haven’t sent an invoice. The car hasn’t broken down, but you’ve already paid for the tow truck, the mechanic and the speech to your manager. You’ve paid in sleep. In attention. In the dinner you didn’t taste.

Worry pays for problems that haven’t sent an invoice.

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The trick is that it feels responsible. Like if you stop thinking about the rent for one second, the rent wins. “What does it avail to run out to meet your suffering?” Seneca asks. “You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives.”

If it arrives.

Same Fear, Different Costumes

Knowing that doesn’t make this anxiety stop. The proof that worry keeps us stuck is what it makes us do. In my head, it wears four costumes.

The Scatterer starts everything: a fintech app, a web agency, this blog, a networking cert, all on top of the job that pays the bills. Every unfinished project keeps a part of your mind behind. Researchers call it attention residue: part of your attention stays with a task you abandoned, and eventually it catches up with us.2

The Freezer starts nothing. What if I try and it doesn’t work? You can’t fail at what you don’t try—but you can’t win either.

The Escaper is just elsewhere. Reels. A 4 pm nap that’s really a hiding place with a pillow. Drugs and partying with the homies.

The Researcher, my personal favorite, calls procrastination “due diligence.” Fourteen tabs open in their browser. The smart person’s way to procrastinate.

Four costumes. One question underneath: what if it doesn’t work out?

Here, But Not Here

And it doesn’t ask quietly. It asks at the dinner table.

That’s the part we leave off the bill: what it costs the people next to us—our partners, friends and family. You’re at the table, laughing half a second after everyone else because you caught the joke on your way back from next March. Or you’re too needy—“You think it’ll work out?” “Did they seem mad?” “Do they like me?”—borrowing calm from the people you love until they feel like a support hotline.

And half of it is worrying what they think of you, when they’ve already forgotten. For people remember you a lot less than you remember you. That’s a relief and an insult at the same time.

Physically present. Emotionally on a business trip to 2031.

So why do we keep booking that costly time-travel trip? Why are we always ruminating on future events? On past events? Because we’re built for it. It’s our biological hardware.

In 2006, researchers at Yale gave capuchin monkeys (distant primate cousins—we shared a common ancestor about 35 million years ago) tokens to trade with two people. Even Stephen showed one piece of an apple and handed over one. Larry Loss showed two, then handed over one. Same deal. The monkeys picked Even Stephen about 79% of the time. Honestly, I wouldn’t trade with Larry either.3

Psychologists call it loss aversion: losing something tends to hurt more than gaining it feels good. That’s the Freezer, explained. We’re not paying for a future. We’re paying to avoid losing one.

The Islamic scripture (Quran) said it long before any monkey market: “Indeed, mankind was created anxious” (70:19). Impatient when harm touches him. Holding back when good comes.4

So it’s not a bug. It’s factory settings.

But the verse makes an exception: those who pray, and who are constant in it. Not the ones who stop being human. The ones who keep showing up. Constant—the exact opposite of the Scatterer.

Tie Your Camel

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Cool connection, handsome lad. But the rent is real.”

It is. So what—stop planning? Just vibe?

No. A man once asked the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ whether he should leave his camel untied and trust in God. The answer: “Tie her, and trust in Allah [God].”5

The man had one camel and still had to ask. I have a 2001 Corolla. I’d have asked twice.

That’s the line between preparation and worry. Preparation ties the camel. Worry stands next to the tied camel all night, staring at the rope. Living in what may be and what was, rather than what is.

Preparation ties the camel. Worry stands next to the tied camel all night, staring at the rope.

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It answers the Freezer too. Do the work, and some goals you’ll hit, some you won’t. But the person who tied the camel and lost it anyway still learned to tie a knot. The person who never tried learned one thing: how to keep asking “what if.”

Just don’t confuse grinding out of fear with tying the camel. Working till midnight and burning out by Thursday is tying it, untying it, and retying it forty times because you don’t trust the knot. I’ve been this guy too. Perhaps I still am in some parts of my gloriously cooked life.

The work is yours. The outcome never was.

So how can we navigate this biological software within us?

Something embarrassingly small. Grab a pen—or your notes app, I’m not your dad—and write it down. “What am I worried about?” “Is it here yet?” “What can I do today?” No. “What can I do now?” “When did I last survive something worse?”

In a small Penn State study, people with chronic anxiety logged their worries, then checked weeks later. 91.4% never came true. I’d bet my shitty Corolla your number looks similar. Imagine being wrong 91% of the time at your job. You’d be fired. Your brain gets a promotion.6

And that last question is why Seneca opened with a fighter. He was showing his friend—and us—that we’ve been dropped before. We are still getting dropped, and we will still be dropped across our whole timeline. And every time, so far, we got up. Our record for surviving our worst days is perfect.

If you were reading to find a solution to this incredible biological dilemma, well…

Wrong article.