When I was twenty-three, I was in a life-changing car accident.

While driving through an intersection I saw a truck barrelling toward me from the left. The driver either didn’t see or care that the light was red on their end. As quickly as my mortal reflexes allowed, I swerved to the right to avoid being T-boned. 

The truck scraped the side of my car, careened into the traffic island, and completely flipped upside down (the driver and passenger were luckily wearing seatbelts). Hazard tape and cop cars covered the scene within minutes, and a film crew took position on top of a nearby building. 

Was it luck or reflexes that helped me survive? It was probably a bit of both, but the “luck” part I’ve struggled to come to terms with ever since.

Not only did I survive that day but I got out of it without a scratch. I even declined the police officer’s invitation to visit the hospital. It would have been easy to spin a narrative that I, like the main character in a summer blockbuster film, would never actually die or come to any serious harm.

But I knew in my guts this wasn’t true. I’d had a brush with mortality. Just a few seconds’ delay and I could have wound up in a vegetative state, or a morgue. The crash scene the camera people were filming from the nearby building wasn’t of some random stranger, it was me. And I was the random stranger to all the passersby and news watchers.

I had learned a bittersweet lesson: I was lucky, but not special.

“I Never Thought It Would Happen to Me”

Each of us is special as far as our talents, personality, and most of all, the meaningful role we play in the lives of a select few. My mother’s face is just one of anonymous millions to a stranger, but to me, she’s a mainstay. The sight of her in a crowd changes the whole scene. To the universe, however, we are all strangers. None of us gets a hall pass to dodge the forces of nature and evil. How we come to terms with this difficult truth determines much of the quality of our lives.

American psychiatrist Irvin Yalom in his book Love’s Executioner shares the story of Elva, an older widow who comes into his office with a defeated expression and announces, “I never thought it would happen to me.” The event in question is the theft of her purse. 

Yalom notes:

Along with her purse and her three hundred dollars, an illusion was snatched away from Elva –the illusion of personal specialness. She had always lived in the privileged circle, outside the unpleasantness, the nasty inconveniences visited on ordinary people – those swarming masses of the tabloids and newscasts who are forever being robbed or maimed. 

The robbery changed everything. Gone was the coziness, the softness in her life; gone was the safety. Her home had always beckoned her with its cushions, gardens, comforters, and deep carpets. Now she saw locks, doors, burglar alarms, and telephones. She had always walked her dog every morning at six. The morning stillness now seemed menacing. She and her dog stopped and listened for danger. ¹

I can relate to Elva. My driving incident permanently changed the way I view the road. I don’t let anxiety keep me from buying groceries, but I’m aware that I take a risk every time I do.

While there is a relief in facing this reality rather than living in denial, it’s also not always fun to live knowing that a Sword of Damocles hangs over my head – over all of our heads – our entire lives. The sword is made more bearable by the fact it’s usually invisible, but it’s always there. And each of us must forge a worldview that lets us coexist with the invisible sword as we buy groceries, get married, have children, and fly across the world on jumbo jets.

“Cheerful Pessimism”

The ancient Stoics specialized in dealing with loss and uncertainty. They favored an approach called premeditatio malorum, “the premeditation of evils”: the idea was to allow yourself to imagine the terrible things that could happen to you and make peace with the outcome right then in your mind. Then when the ancient Roman equivalent of a car accident happened, you weren’t driven to despair.

In a particularly poignant example, the philosopher Epictetus advises that you practice imagining your spouse or children dying whenever you embrace them:

When you are kissing your child, or your wife, say to yourself that you are kissing a mortal; for though they are dear to you, yet it is the nature of a human being to die, so that if, even while you are kissing them, they should die, you will not be disturbed.  ²

It’s worth noting that Epictetus does not mean you won’t feel any grief at all, but that you’ll bounce back faster than if you’d never allowed yourself to consider the thought. I appreciate this sentiment, but as someone who is already inclined to imagine morbid things, I suspect that premeditating upon “evil” scenarios for the sake of our well-being has its limits. Stoicism practiced correctly allows for love and vulnerability, but the desire to protect ourselves can also block us from love and vulnerability if we’re not careful.

Hope, by definition, means not knowing and yet having a positive bent that lies somewhere between longing and trusting.

A more modern take on premeditatio malorum is “cheerful pessimism,” as described by the Nobel-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. Less than a year before he passed away, he went over this topic in an interview:

Interviewer:  …[Y]ou claim that if you’re a pessimist, life never disappoints you. Is this true and has it served you well?

Kahneman: That is true. I am a pessimist. I have been called a cheerful pessimist because I’m usually in a fairly good mood. So when I lose my keys, my first impulse is that I will never find them again although I should know better but this is how I think. So I’m prepared, I’m already figuring out what will I do if I never find my keys. ³

I appreciate Kahneman’s extremely practical approach. The question is, can we be cheerfully pessimistic about losing our legs or arms or a loved one the same way we are about losing our keys? It’s smart, easy even, to be a pessimist about not finding your car keys or your library card. With some effort, we can be cheerful pessimists about losing our savings in the stock market or our home to a wildfire. But being a “cheerful pessimist” in light of your only child dying of cancer seems callous.

Epictetus is right when he says that it’s in the nature of a human being to die, but the natural human life cycle is that children grow into adults and die only when old. ⁴ The large number of exceptions to this scenario doesn’t make it any less harrowing. Nor does the commonness of car accidents make it any less tragic when twenty-three-year-olds die in them. Yes, I was spared, but many others no less deserving aren’t.

We may not be “personally special” in the words of Yalom, but is it wrong to yearn to be? The ingredient that keeps us from becoming the cranky type of pessimists is hope. Hope is a deeply misunderstood concept, too often confused with ignorance. Hope, by definition, means not knowing and yet having a positive bent that lies somewhere between longing and trusting. If our hopes become too narrow or specific they become foolish. But to hope that things won’t always be as bitter as they are now, that something different and better will come to light or come into being, is a powerful mechanism for fighting darkness.

Hope will always have its detractors. Some believe that anything other than cold hard logic is foolishness, even when dealing with “evils” in life. Others cling to whatever beliefs or ideas they find most comforting and shun all else. The only thing that’s certain about uncertainty (and unfairness) is that none of us is safe from it while we’re alive.

And somehow, we must find a way to be okay with that.

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Read Next: What Is the Relationship Between Luck and Happiness? →

1. Yalom, I. D. (2012). Love’s executioner & other tales of psychotherapy (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
2. From Discourses (3.24.84).
3. You can read the article here.
4. I get that in Epictetus’s time far more children did not survive childhood compared to now. The larger point remains.