The sentence reads like reassurance. It is an invoice. Most of what you dreaded last year never arrived — and you paid for it anyway, in advance, at full price.

Notice the mechanics. The hard conversation you have been putting off has already happened a dozen times in your head, each rehearsal worse than the last. The email you do not want to send has been drafted and deleted and re-dreaded across three mornings. The actual sending will take ninety seconds. The dread took three days.

This is the strange arithmetic Seneca is pointing at. The mind is a poor forecaster but a vivid one. It cannot tell you what will happen, but it can show you, in high resolution, every version of what might — and it charges you for each screening. The meeting you fear, the number you are afraid to check, the project you have labelled too big: most of their weight is interest on a loan the future never asked you to take out.

The test is simple. Name the thing sitting heaviest on you right now. Then separate two questions: what will actually happen, and what am I imagining will happen. The gap between those two is the suffering Seneca means. It is almost always larger than the thing itself.

So today, before 10am, do the one thing you have been dreading — the call, the send, the open file. Not because it will be pleasant. Because the only way to stop paying imaginary interest is to meet the real thing and find out how small it was.