The decent-case scenario

For when the best case feels like too much to hope for

Photo by author

I am an expert at dreaming up worst-case scenarios. I’ve had a lifetime of practice taking perfectly ordinary circumstances and spinning them into massive threats. Lest you think I exaggerate:

• When I was 8, I got a weird pimple on my arm. I was terrified it was cancer (I’d been reading a series of books about kids with life-threatening illnesses — perhaps not the best choice, in hindsight, for a child with undiagnosed anxiety).

• When I was 16, I was absolutely certain that anything less than an A would jeopardize my entire lifelong future.

• When I was 23, I got mild tendonitis in my ankle, didn’t treat it right away, and convinced myself I had irreparably damaged the joint (and maybe also had cancer somehow).

• When I was 30, I was traveling for work and saw a weird-looking bug in my room. I was afraid it was a kissing bug and killed it immediately. It was not a kissing bug, and it didn’t bite me. I still obsessed for weeks over the possibility of getting Chagas disease and even called an advice nurse in a panic at one point.

I could go on, but you get the idea. In moments of high anxiety or uncertainty, I find it very difficult to believe that best-case or even good-case scenarios are possible for me (despite mounds of evidence to the contrary).

My examples are extreme (hello, clinical anxiety), but I think a lot of us feel this way about stuff that matters to us. We have trouble believing that our creative work is actually good, that other people might care about it, that our efforts could someday amount to more than futile screaming into the void.

Maybe we believe best-case scenarios don’t happen to people like us. Maybe we believe we lack the connections or resources to achieve a best-case scenario or that we just aren’t that lucky. Maybe the very best-case scenario really is implausible (most people don’t get rich from their art).

Enter the decent-case scenario

If imagining best-case scenarios feels too impossible, or if your brain, like mine, tends to go into overdrive spinning up worst-case scenarios, might I suggest imagining a decent-case scenario instead? Or even a tolerable-case scenario?

A scenario, in other words, that isn’t totally ideal, has some pros and some cons, and is something you feel like you can live with. Life, in other words. I’m talking about life.

It might work like this:

You want a career that’s better aligned to your interests and values. You dream of a creative career where you earn a six-figure living working on projects you love, but you feel discouraged by how hard that is, and you’re starting to feel like you can’t do it.

Instead of leaning into “if you can dream it, you can achieve it”-style toxic positivity OR “I’m going to wind up back in a job I hate because I have to pay my bills” anxiety (oh it me), you imagine something in the middle.

In our decent-case scenario, maybe you do have to take on work you aren’t madly in love with to pay the bills, but maybe you also get to work with really cool people, and the extra money frees up the mental energy you need to keep investing in your creative work.

Not so terrible, right?

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