An envelope left at your door, from the landlord. On the evening news, prices are up again: bread, electricity, transport. At night you lie in bed, but numbers spin in your head: "What if the rent goes up again? What if I lose my job?" In this conversation we talk about the stress of rising prices and rent, how economic uncertainty eats away at our sleep, and a strange-looking Stoic exercise: thinking about the worst in advance. The question from Seneca's letter to his young friend Lucilius still clears the fog of fear two thousand years later: "Is this the condition that I feared?"

📖 Sources in the video:
• Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 18: spending a few days with the scantiest and cheapest fare and coarse dress, then asking: "Is this the condition that I feared?"; the image of soldiers training in peacetime.
• The Stoic exercise of the "premeditation of evils" (Latin praemeditatio malorum).
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1: preparing for the day with the thought "Today I shall meet with ungrateful, rude, selfish people."
• Turkish proverb: "White coins are for black days."

💬 Which "what if" is keeping you up most these days? If you wrote it in two columns, what would you put first under "What will I do if it does?" Share in the comments; no one is judged here.

Restful sleep, open roads, my dear friend.