"Don't Worry"?
On the Idiocy and Rationality of a Phrase
A common refrain I hear from dog walkers is “Don’t worry, he’s safe.” Hearing this alarms me. I don’t doubt the dog’s general safety, his history of not having bitten in the past. I doubt the owner’s capacity to judge based upon that history. I’m not worried about the rule, but the exception. “Don’t worry, he’s safe” is similar to saying “stocks can only go up.” It’s patently false. By definition, every dog that has bitten was once a first time biter. You never see it coming. Whenever someone says “Don’t worry,” my neurons fire up, worry, yes, you’re right, I should be worried.
Yogis and meditators will say that one should minimize worry time. Be in the now. But sometimes it's important to be in the later. The more mature practitioners know this. They don’t try to stop worrying, only to control when they allow themselves to worry.
Is worrying rational? Often, the retort is that it is pointless to worry about something you can’t do anything about, or about something that you aren’t going to do anything about in the present moment. But that sounds like procrastination. Maybe you can do something. And besides how are you to know whether you can or can’t do something unless you’ve worried about that, first? Worrying too much is neurotic. But a person who genuinely doesn’t worry (as opposed to just hides behind a persona of being care-free and “chill”) is likely a person who lacks a strong sense of agency. The key, then, is to worry a healthy amount.
The dog-owner is saying don’t spend your worry-budget on this. There are other things to worry about. That’s true. But even if the risk of dog-bite is small relative to nuclear war, I can do something about the dog. I can run away. I can’t really prevent a dictator from pressing the button.
What do you worry about? What do you wish you worried more about? Less? Given that we never see it coming, shouldn’t we admit that we are always worried about the wrong things? Should we be worried about that? No. Because then there’d still be something else we were missing. So we’re fine as we are. Worry on.
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