The real wisdom here isn't about worrying—it's about how our imagination often proves more cruel than circumstance itself. Twain observes something psychology now confirms: we're far better at conjuring elaborate disasters than at enduring the simpler troubles that actually arrive. A person might spend weeks catastrophizing about a job interview that lasts twenty minutes, or construct an entire narrative of rejection before receiving a single rejection. What saves us, oddly, is that reality, however difficult, has the mercy of being *finite*—it ends when the thing ends, whereas our invented suffering can compound endlessly in the dark hours before dawn.