Ultimately worrying is like most things—including college and Presidential elections and kegels and prayer—we’ll never really know if it makes a hair-split of difference in the end.

If you’re living in the same world as me, you’ve been told: Worrying makes bad things happen.

When considering this admonition, I imagine the terrible things I’m responsible for. I see the crack-sick burglar finding the open window in the bedroom of a child. There’s Dick Cheney getting his second wind and scheduling another meeting with oil barons who are securing no-bid contracts on our souls. A single herpe finds its way out of a condom and onto the genitalia of a cheating newlywed.

Of course, most humans aren’t capable of authoring the horror of the Holocaust or the awfulness of Darfur. But the only thing worse than the terribleness that occurs in this world is all the misery we envisage in our minds.

We constantly manufacture a million worst-case, what’ll-happen-if-you-keep-making-that-face, OMFG scenarios every single day.

Most worries are subdued with a breath or a distraction, but the engine of worry still chugs along.

But why? Why do we worry? Why do we waste the thoughts and torment our souls and visualize disasters again and again and again? Here are a few theories:

1. We learn something from worrying.
Maybe the need to know is why we rubberneck on the freeway. Maybe our brain is seeking crucial information—the lanes to avoid, the hurt we could attract, the crunchiness of a particular make and model. Maybe worrying is our brain continually reinforcing the lessons we need. Maybe we learn from the failures and failings of others—through their wrongs we learn to outsmart fate.

Maybe it’s not bloodlust or schadenfreude that motivates our internal drama machine: It’s the will to be better, to fail less.
Frankly, I don’t buy this theory at all. Because with all the worrying going on, we should be in a much better place—like a beach with no sand or a geothermally heated monastery on Mars or a hot-fudge-sundae heaven.

2. We worry because we know there’s nothing else we can do.
You try to donate blood, but the homeless prefer money. You vote against the Iraq War, but it’s four years too late. You don’t want your heart broken, but love ends—by death or by doubt, love ends. There’s nothing we can do to stop Charles Darnay from getting the guillotine or Camus from making that wrong turn or the stock market slurping down the future we hoped for. So we worry, because it’s a way to pretend that we have some say. It’s our brains way of cheering or jeering along. Like the tired mantra “If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen,” worry is just another mediocre tool we use to stay sane.

3. We worry because we want terrible things to happen.
How different are our worries from our dreams? Aren’t the two merged in our mind in such a blurred way that makes the two almost indistinguishable?

Our worries drift into our dreams, where they are settled or diffused with a million different sublimations. Sometimes our worries win over and wake us with a world of agonizing and often imagined troubles.

Freud said that dreams are wish fulfillment. We are all that puppy suckling a teet in our sleep, only able to rest when we get what we long for in our waking hours.

So it could be that we love bad news. We crave the worst. That’s why we could watch the plane hitting Tower 1, the Challenger exploding or the tight end’s knee bending an impossible way over and over again.

We don’t want the happy stuff.

We won’t watch a movie where the stakes aren’t high. We don’t care about a politician who hasn’t overcome the pain of a broken home or a capsized PT boat or a Vietnamese soldier making a cross in the dirt. We love the bad parts—from a distance. And our worries give us just enough distance to get the burst of knowing and savoring of an existence that we live to toy with.

Maybe all our worrying is really a pleasure—the pleasure of everyone getting exactly what they deserve. Maybe we are just that twisted.

4. We worry because we love to pretend.
In that blissful forgetfulness we glimpse when we awake in the days after a tragedy oblivious for a few seconds of the nightmare our lives have become, we see what is possible. We could lose the plot of our lives at any moment. We are capable though chemicals or head injury or some other magical means to slip out of the storylines that used to make sense of our lives.

I could forget the dreams I have, the man I was supposed to become. Enmity could pass through me like a black bean soufflé. Love can be seen for what it is: a luxury and a curse.

But we live for the story, perhaps because we have to. What else would get us up before dawn but the promise of a happy ending eventually changing us completely into a soul that pleasures in simple existence?

The story of redemption, rebirth, or “being saved” defines so many lives on this earth. And when that story is challenged we’ll go to war to save it.

We need our delusions, and our worries are the thread that keeps the story together. Without them, we would be nothing.

As our mind slips into sleep, our body shakes, making certain that wherever we are resting can sustain us. Once safe, sleep takes over and lasts for as long as it can.

Worries are our way to shake all the time, checking our stability again and again.

In the dim light that ends any day, any movie, any life, we cling to our worries. Because, perhaps, they have no other purpose other than reminding us that we—unlike poor Bernie—are still alive.

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