In a HuffPo lifestyle post, Cornell human development prof Karl Pillemer writes that the biggest regret of the “very old” is that they spent too much of their life worrying.

Their advice on this issue is devastatingly simple and direct: Worry is an enormous waste of your precious and limited lifetime. They suggested training yourself to reduce or eliminate worrying as the single most positive step you can make toward greater happiness. The elders conveyed, in urgent terms, that worry is an unnecessary barrier to joy and contentment.

The point isn’t that they stopped caring, or would have resigned themselves to the misery life threw at them.  Rather, we all tend to indulge in what can best be described as “free-floating worrying,” the sort of stuff that keeps people awake at night fraught with concern over impending doom.

Pillemer’s research showed that at the end of life, old people looked back at the time lost to worrying and realized that it accomplished nothing positive but served to steal that time from their lives which they would never have back.

The elders see worry as a crippling feature of our daily existence and suggest that we do everything in our power to change it. Why is excessive worry such a big regret? Because, according to the elders, worry wastes your very limited and precious lifetime. By poisoning the present moment, they told me, you lose days, months, or years that you can never recover.

Why care what old people think? They have perspective that younger folks lack. Been there, done that, sort of thing.

There is a valuable distinction in Pillemer’s work that seems to elude many.  It is not that we should go through life oblivious or unconcerned about real issues that affect our lives, but that worry about them isn’t a solution, but a waste of time.  Rather than worry, there are three things to consider instead:

Hope for the best but prepare for the worst

Don’t hate me for quoting Ronald Reagan. He had good speech writers. Most people tend to pick a place where they’re comfortable, being either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. It becomes a matter of pride after a while, but blinds them to reality which is going to smack them in the face either way.  When it does, it’s a huge shock, even though they might have seen it coming miles away had they not allowed their view to be colored by a rosy or gloomy outlook.

Everybody has good times and bad. Some of us more of one than the other, but fortune doesn’t always break your way.  Save for a rainy day, but don’t sink everything into your life insurance policy. Really want that new iPad to show your friends how cool you are? So buy it, provided it doesn’t break you.  Nobody is impressed by your new Apple water heater, but if you don’t have enough socked away to buy a new one. it’s really going to suck when the old one dies and you realize there’s no app for hot water.

Bad things happen, but if you realize this beforehand and accept the fact that you will not go through life unscathed, you will be prepared to deal with it, fix it, and come out the other end not too much worse for wear.  Being perpetually positive won’t give you hot water, and even your friends who adore your attitude won’t care much for your odor if you don’t maintain appropriate bathing rituals.

Take responsibility for your life

The most common response from the Slackoisie is to blame their parents for doing such a lousy job of raising them and generically screwing up the world.  They sit on the couch in their parents basement scarfing Cheetos, smug in the knowledge that they have someone else to blame.  And that makes your life better how?

Boomers suck? Your helicopter mom ruined your life? Fair enough, but having someone to blame for your misery isn’t going to make your misery go away.  It’s your life. Do something about it. Wallowing is a form of worrying and an utter waste of time. No one’s life ever got better because it was spent wallowing. 

Sure, it’s hard to come up with things to do when the world is looking bleak, but what most often paralyzes people is that they don’t like their options and keeping hoping that a better option will magically appear tomorrow. So today, they’re just going to keep playing computer games and worrying about their future. And when no better option appears tomorrow, you wait for the next day. And the next. How’s that working for you?

The bedfellow of worrying is inertia. You worry long and hard, and that prevents you from acting, doing. There is an alternative: fix your own damn life. It may not be easy. It probably won’t be fixed in the sense that you get what you always wanted out of life, but seizing the opportunity to get off the couch and do something is always better than worrying, wallowing in misery, and doing nothing. 

Your life won’t fix itself, though as time goes on, you will find yourself inured to your life of misery and the indentation your butt made in the couch cushion. Is this why you exist?  If not, take responsibility and change it. No one else can do it for you. Not even mommy.

Distinguish between things you can control and things you can’t

If you can make a dent in the aspect of life that would otherwise cause you to worry, then it’s your duty to make that dent. But there are things in life you can’t control. Get t-boned at an intersection by a kid texting “kewl” who missed the red light? Sorry, but you can’t stop her from causing tragedy. Drive well and defensively, so you avoid getting killed or killing to the extent possible, but don’t waste a second worrying about the idiot who, despite your best efforts, can’t be bothered doing the same with her hand on the wheel of a 2000 lb. missile.

If this sounds remarkably like the serenity prayer, beloved by alcoholics and theologians alike, it’s because it is.  Even the most effective person in the world can’t control who gets cancer.  What we can do is distinguish the risks that are significant enough, real enough, to address, and the ones that are too insignificant, too far fetched, to be worthy of our time.

We can’t fix everything in an imperfect world, make it completely safe, secure, wonderful and happy. As bad ass physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson observed, there are just too many unlikely random possibilities out there, so that it is highly likely that a highly unlikely event will happen to you. But since it will be a highly unlikely random event, there is no way to predict it or prepare for it.  Get over it. It’s going to happen despite your best efforts (or the size of your bag of Cheetos). 

Pillemer suggests that this is the route to a happy life. Whether that’s true isn’t clear, as happy isn’t the alternative to worrying. If enough bad stuff happens, whether fortuitously or because of your own bad choices, you can have a pretty lousy life.  But it won’t be nearly as lousy plus wasted, and at the very least, there is some comfort to be taken in knowing that you didn’t take life lying down and you did the best you could with what you had and what came your way.

H/T Kathleen Casey