Kafka once wrote a short story called The Burrow, about an animal that became obsessed with protecting itself against imagined threats. It burrows down, it builds up walls, and it stays up day and night, waiting for this imagined threat which never comes. But of course, the story isn't about the animal. It is about you and me.
Most of what we defend ourselves against will never arrive. A break-in, a betrayal, a diagnosis, a redundancy. We build up these walls and we brace ourselves. We constantly wait in anxious anticipation for a fear that never manifests. And so we become obsessed and trapped because our mind cannot differentiate between a real and imagined danger.
Kafka's burrow is terrible in two ways. The first is that we can never hope to win a war against an imagined enemy. We cannot hold what we do not know, and we cannot overcome that which exists only in a nightmare.
And the second, as the Stoic Seneca put it, we often suffer more in the imagination than in reality. We catastrophise and we exaggerate. Our nightmares take on an entire weight of their own.
And so the burrowed animal spent so long in their paranoid fortress that they forget how to live life. They are constantly worried about an imagined danger just over the horizon, that they forget to leave their home and enjoy the life they have to actually live. Because sometimes the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And sometimes we have to step out of the burrow if we are to live at all.