Montaigne on Imagined Misfortunes and Anxiety
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. — Michel de Montaigne
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
Where does this idea show up in your life right now?
The Misfortunes We Manufacture
Montaigne’s line captures a familiar irony: the mind can live through disasters that reality never delivers. Although misfortune sounds like an external blow, he points inward, suggesting that a substantial portion of our suffering is self-authored—written in anticipation, revised by fear, and reread as certainty. From that starting point, the quote reframes “a hard life” as partly a story we tell ourselves. The events may remain unreal, yet the bodily and emotional toll—tension, dread, sleeplessness—can feel completely real, which is exactly what makes imagined misfortune so convincing.
Anticipation as a Hidden Form of Pain
If suffering can be produced in advance, then worry becomes a kind of prepayment for tragedies that may never arrive. Montaigne’s insight is that anticipation doesn’t simply prepare us; it can also consume the very time we hoped to protect, turning the present into a staging ground for future catastrophes. In everyday life this looks like rehearsing a conversation that hasn’t happened, or envisioning a medical scare from a minor symptom. The mind argues it is being prudent, yet it often slides from planning into rumination, multiplying “terrible misfortunes” without adding any new capability to meet them.
A Stoic Echo: Suffering Twice
Moving from observation to philosophy, Montaigne’s thought aligns with Stoic cautions against compounding pain. Seneca’s Letters (c. 65 AD) warns that we are “more often frightened than hurt,” a claim that mirrors the idea that dread can exceed the injury itself. This connection matters because it distinguishes useful foresight from self-torment. The Stoics did not reject preparation; rather, they rejected living as if the worst were already true. In that light, Montaigne isn’t denying hardship—he is diagnosing the extra suffering added by imagination.
Why the Brain Predicts Disaster
Shifting into a psychological lens, catastrophizing is a well-documented cognitive distortion: we overestimate threat, underestimate coping, and treat uncertainty as danger. From an evolutionary angle, this bias makes some sense—false alarms were cheaper than missed predators—yet in modern life it can keep the nervous system on constant alert. Consequently, “misfortunes that never happened” are not mere daydreams; they are predictions the brain treats as urgent. Understanding this mechanism softens self-blame: worry is not simply weakness, but a misfiring safety system that can be recalibrated.
The Present as the Antidote
Once we see how the future hijacks the present, the remedy begins to look like returning attention to what is actually occurring. Montaigne’s Essays (first published 1580) repeatedly circle back to lived experience, implying that sanity lies in inhabiting the day at hand rather than the disasters of tomorrow. Practically, this means separating what is real, what is possible, and what is imagined. Planning belongs to the first two categories; spiraling belongs to the third. By re-centering on immediate facts—what you can observe and do now—you reduce the mind’s incentive to populate the horizon with calamities.
Turning Insight into a Daily Practice
Finally, Montaigne’s sentence functions as both confession and instruction: notice how often fear speaks in the past tense about a future that never arrived. A simple habit follows naturally—when a “terrible misfortune” appears, ask what evidence exists, what action is available, and what can be postponed until more information is real. Over time, this approach doesn’t eliminate hardship, but it prevents unnecessary suffering from crowding out life. In other words, you still meet genuine misfortunes when they come; you just stop living through dozens of them in advance.