It’s easy to look at history and despair. Humans have been terrible to each other–going back to Marcus Aurelius’s time all the way through today. In fact, sometimes it feels like that’s all we’ve ever been.

The writer Mary Karr once asked a religious friend, “How can you believe in God, you know, when there was a Holocaust?” The friend had a reply that stopped her cold: “But you’re not in the Holocaust.”

In his writings, Seneca talks a lot about how we tend to worry ourselves into spirals of anxiety and despair. We look at what has happened and we extrapolate out what could happen. We suffer in our imaginations, he says, far more than we’re actually suffering in reality right now. That’s the lesson Karr took from that friend, especially as she tried to get sober. “Yes, we’re worried about what’s going to happen,” she would later explain. “We’re not in a nuclear war right now. Our hair’s not on fire. That doesn’t mean I think we should be passive, and shouldn’t take action, but I think there should be a reality check.”

This was her point especially to those who were consumed with dread because they follow politics too closely or because of some forecasted natural disaster that may not even materialize. You can’t let that paralyze you, or cripple you emotionally. The potential of future suffering is not a reason to suffer now, the Stoics would say. On the contrary, it’s a reason to be present now. To be good now. To love and live, now.

That future may come…and you’ll meet it. If there’s something you can do to prevent it, do it. But hopelessness and despair and dread and anger? They do nothing for nobody–least of all you.