A cooper loses the account his whole year rested on, and he can see the ruin coming: the empty larder, the hard winter, his family going without. He braces for the worst. And the worst never comes — the winter is lean and tiring, but survivable — and it's his twelve-year-old son who says the thing he couldn't see: "That wasn't so bad. You said it'd be starving." In this episode we use the Crosshollow tale "The Cooper's Winter" to explore a well-documented finding from psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson: we consistently overestimate how bad, and how lasting, our misfortunes will be. We have an unconscious "psychological immune system" that helps us cope and adapt — but because we can't feel it working, we brace for catastrophes that mostly never arrive. This isn't "every cloud has a silver lining"; the cooper's loss is real. It's something truer and kinder — that so much of what we suffer, we suffer in advance, in dread, over a ruin that never comes to collect. A conversation about fear, resilience, and the winters that turn out to be only winters. The podcast has an accompanying blog: The Cooper's Winter