The real sting of Seneca's observation lies not in saying we worry too much, but in recognizing that our mind is a remarkably efficient *factory of suffering*—we can manufacture genuine anguish from mere possibility, from stories we haven't yet lived. Most people treat this as permission to dismiss their anxieties ("it's just in your head"), when Seneca means something far more serious: that the pain itself is entirely real, even if its cause isn't. A person lying awake at 3 a.m., convinced they've ruined a relationship over a text message that was probably fine, experiences authentic distress—their body tense, their stomach tight—yet the disaster exists only in rehearsal. What makes this worth remembering isn't that we should stop worrying, but that recognizing the imaginative source gives us an unfamiliar kind of power: the suffering is real, but so is our ability to interrupt it.