simply put:

“Worry is not productive; it’s a kind of procrastination. I like to pretend worry is passive, something your brain does when it’s trapped and helpless, but it’s more often a way to avoid taking some direct action that would be frightening, difficult, inconvenient or boring, like drawing up a monthly budget or doing sit-ups or finally just summoning up the nerve to ask someone What, exactly, The Deal Is.

Natural selection has made us hypervigilant, obsessively replaying our mistakes and imagining worst-case scenarios. And the fact that we’ve eliminated almost all of the immediate threats from our environment, like leopards and Hittites, has only made us even more jittery, because we’re now constantly anticipating disasters that are never going to happen: the prowler/rapist/serial killer lurking in the closet, a pandemic of Ebola/Bird Flu/Hantavirus, the imminent fascist/socialist/zombie takeover. The disasters that do befall us are mostly slow, incremental ones that seem abstract and faraway until they suddenly blindside us, like heart disease and foreclosure. So we go about our days safer and more comfortable than human beings have been in five million years, constantly hunched and growling with a low level of fight-or-flight chemicals in our bloodstreams.

Which is why it’s such a relief, an exhilarating joy, to break the clammy paralysis of worry and place yourself at last in real physical danger.

Your brain’s glad to finally have a real job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint. I’m convinced these are the conditions in which we evolved to thrive: under moderate threat of death at all times, brain and body fully integrated, senses on high alert, completely engaged with our environment. It is, if not how we’re happiest… how we are most fully and electrically alive.

We are the creatures who live in time, as salamanders live in fire, prisoners of memory and imagination, tortured with dread and regret.”

Parts of an interesting piece by Tim Kreider