Negative Visualization

I won something recently—a contest I had entered at the behest of my friends in February or March and forgotten about until last Friday. Now, what I won is not of particularly great importance, other than to say that it was neither life-changing nor insignificant.¹ It was important enough for me to tell my friends about, at any rate, and for a two or three day stretch this weekend they were more excited about it than I was.

On Friday, someone asked why I wasn’t more excited to have tentatively won a contest, and I replied, in so many words, that it was because I had only tentatively won a contest. Though it wasn’t evident in the fine print, recent circumstances in my life may have precluded me from winning (or so I figured) because I had essentially already acquired by myself what I was to have won. I would find out for sure on Monday, and until then, I wasn’t going to allow myself get too excited one way or another.

I knew that at best, winning the contest had the power to turn this into a pretty good year. At worst, being disqualified would have no measurable impact on my life whatsoever. (Like I’d mentioned, this was something that was not even on my radar until the moment I was told I’d won.) Either way, it was going an anecdote for the rest of my life—I never win contests, let alone enter them—and I’d be happy about it on Monday, if happiness were indeed warranted.

Negative visualization is a Stoic technique meant to temper negative emotions, or, put differently: the process of asking yourself, “What’s the worst that can happen?” When you consider how something might make you feel in a worst case scenario, you can determine in advance if that feeling is at all rational or productive. Often times you’ll find, like I did, that the cost of something not working out in your favor is exactly zero: you’ll get to live the same happy life you were living before. Other times, you’ll become all the more appreciative of everything you have right now.

This was the first time in my life that I applied negative visualization without proactively telling myself to do so, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t almost as excited about that as I was the whole “winning the contest” thing. By coming to terms with the outcome before it was known, disappointment was no longer in the realm of possibility. Raising a pretentious beer in celebration, however, remained totally viable—after all, I had won a freaking contest.