More than anything else, fear is the strongest motivator, though we’re often unaware of its presence in our minds. While love is a choice, fear is a strong reactive feeling that can override our understanding.
When we imagine loss in the past, we tend to experience sadness, but imagining loss in the future will always create fear. In one sense, fear is the “cost” we expect to sacrifice for a decision.
We react about seven times as much to pain as to pleasure, so the feeling of fear can quickly become a state of mind, which we call “anxiety”.
If we’re consistently anxious, we usually have an unknown “dread” we can’t put into language, but we’re afraid of the unknown enough that we don’t want to confront it.
Our fears always start rationally when something we trusted won’t protect us, but subconscious beliefs that contradict reality can easily overpower facts, which can make our fears very irrational.
While most fears have a valid basis, we create fantastically ridiculous expectations when we haven’t released past trauma, and fears attached to them tend to be way overplayed from reality.
When we have a fear-based reaction, our purposes will clearly address a problem we observe. If we’re still anxious after exhausting everything we could have done, we will quickly explore impossible solutions out of trust that we can still control the situation (also known as “panic”).
Since we have so much fear, we tend to hide it behind other language like “anxiety”, “resistance”, “nerves”, “sensibility” or “walls”. Very often, we only stop reacting in fear because of a greater fear we’re fighting.
We tend to be afraid about short-term issues or things we imagine (e.g., sharks, public speaking) and often overlook some things we should be afraid of:
- We can’t be precisely certain of anything, not even who we are or what really exists.
- We can’t predict the future in any reasonable measure, nor have full clarity about what the past even was.
- We’ll all die, with even less certainty of what comes next.
Being at peace is the opposite of living in fear, and is one critical ingredient for living the good life. This comes through intentional, willful release of precisely what we can’t control.
How we respond to fear dictates a lot of our identity through how much we believe we can do something about it.
Fear of Pain
All fear is driven by perceived pain:
- If it’s pain from the past, it’s trauma.
- Pain of the perceived future is anxiety over perceived risks, and we feel plenty of anxiety because it makes intuitive sense for us to feel anxiety now instead of the pain about the matter later.
- If it’s in the present, it usually revolves around a decision that affects the future.
- It can be self-pain or pain upon others, depending on who we love more at the moment.
We can’t do anything about pain. We can only circumvent its effects and maximize other things like pleasure or virtue within it. Most of our fears around diseases and bodily injuries (as well as cultural taboos about them) are from how we imagine pain from the experience.
The pain itself broadly reaches to everything we are capable of identifying with. It could be physical suffering to the body, emotional suffering, the feeling of loss, or any perception of the same in others’. Its only limit is that we feel it’s something in reality.
Often, the reason people inflict pain is from evil, but not necessarily. It can also come from negligence, naïveté, ignorance, self-defense, or merely poor communication skills.
Pain and pleasure aren’t entirely separate. The pain of pursuing a worthy purpose, for example, will heighten pleasure after overcoming it.
The present itself doesn’t have too much pain. Even while being tortured, we can withstand each present moment relatively easily. The true pain comes from our memories and what we imagine could happen in the future, which is a secondary product of memory.
Fear of Death
No matter what form, death is when a critical organ fails when there’s not enough time or technology to find a reliable replacement. That organ could be pierced, crushed, or incinerated. Death by blood loss, for example, is from the heart running out of oxygen. Even if we keep everything intact, we reach the hayflick limit at around age 125, where cells stop reproducing and organs stops regenerating.
And, while we can reproduce most organs, we can’t do anything about a damaged brain. It’s the closest thing to whatever our soul physically connects to, and incredibly complicated. Transferring consciousness with a computer wouldn’t work because computers only make copies and delete the original. No matter how you frame it, death is certain.
The reason death is so difficult to take is from a few difficult realities combined:
- We can declare death itself to be an absolutely certain thing, far more than most things.
- Until we’re near death, we have no idea what will cause it.
- Death always alludes to irreconcilable uncertainties of what happens afterward, and there are many religions that can’t all be correct at once.
To stay mentally well, we’ve somehow found a remarkable way to keep it as knowledge separate from our feelings until we experience death firsthand, which allows us to not think about it constantly moment-to-moment.
To fight death, we tend to obsess about preserving life. The survival impulses for food, water, and shelter are themed extensions of death. We try to prolong its inevitability with risk management tactics such as weight management and preventative healthcare.
The fear of death contributes to far more illogical behavior than we often realize:
- We try to expand a legacy that outlives our passing, often through our children.
- People generally trust law enforcement out of a sense of self-preservation.
- We’ll believe prophecies that promise to avoid death (e.g., rapture, immortality).
- As we get older and time becomes more scarce, we think about death more frequently, which contributes heavily to the purposes we pursue.
- Even wars, when not directed to destroying a people group, are fought with the appearance of fighting for scarce resources that would lead to death if depleted.
Since diseases reproduce some experiences of dying, we become insanely irrational when we encounter them, frequently with obsessive or excessive hygiene. Ironically, our bodies successfully fight 99.99% of them off without help, become stronger for it, and the thing that often kills us is the body’s response to the disease (e.g., inflammation, fever) or the political control involving that response.
The fear of death isn’t the worst fear, though. Dying is, after all, only a few seconds of painful transition to something else that we can’t know. People will generally have a far worse fear of eternal hell, which would in some capacity harm the soul directly.
When we take that fear of death into a more broad application, we tend to create apocalyptic scenarios.
The fear of death is a profound force. If death wasn’t a risk, most pain would quickly become hilarious.
Fear of Truth
Reality itself can be scary, and we’ll frequently block or distort our perception of it.
We have an absurdly irrational fear of true things because they force us to change. Every time we encounter a change, our habits must reprogram, and we introduce more of the unknown into something we had thought was certain. Most of our openness to experience is driven by how we resolve this conflict.
Fear as Fun
Like with other feelings, we find comfort in the familiarity of fear within fiction. We find joy in entertaining ourselves when we know we won’t feel pain from an observed consequence.
The fear-based themes in fantasy stories take on a symbolic association to real-life experiences, and are typically derived from them.
The way we internalize recreational fear can make us stronger to fear (through a type of achievement) or weaker (through continued exposure and anxiety).
Prolonged Fear
Most prolonged fear comes from past trauma, but it can also come from generalized fear of the unknown.
We don’t do well with extended fear. All possible adverse events are likely with enough imagination, so we tend to become increasingly fearful of everything if we focus solely on our fears.
When left unattended, fear can create a feedback loop that dramatizes everything to the point of obsession.
Among others, we’ll also often try to hide our fears from a different fear of what other people think, which will make us even more fearful over time.
If we persist in fear, we can extend our connection with death to other needs and wants that are completely unrelated to death.
Most fears, when nurtured, become an obsession with power towards staying safe against any perceived and imagined threats. At its farthest, a person becomes a victim of their reactions and loses their humanity as they create more victims from the consequences they feel justified in delivering.
Fighting Fear
Courage is pushing against fear to accomplish a purpose. We find courage when we’re trying to preserve something we love, but can also summon a lesser form of courage out of social shame.
We don’t typically need much courage to counteract fear, and a few seconds of boldness at the right timing can change the outcome of a very significant threat.
Most worthwhile endeavors require us to face our fears. Over time, if we keep succeeding, we will start noticing that the presence of our fear is also where we can gain the most success. Eventually, we’ll start looking for things that scare us because those will create the most significant results.
On the other hand, if we keep running from things that scare us, we will likely fall into a trap of addiction somewhere along the way to cope with the feeling of failing and the consequences of cowardice.
Fear in Groups
Some people know how to exploit fear within others to get their way. This is almost always evil, but is the basis of most large-scale leadership.
A fearful group is toxic. People will repeat stories that bear few facts as if they were true, with the only group members opposing it risking popularity in that group.
Fearful people trust a large group to address their problem, mostly because they trust that power over what they can’t see.
One courageous person is capable of sparking a trend of boldness across an entire group of people. It isn’t uncommon to see entire political revolutions shift from one person’s unwillingness to back down from an idea they believe in.
Leaders often become aware of the individuals’ trust in them, and can use a steadily reliable political trick:
- Heighten existing fears.
- Make impossible promises to make people feel secure.
- Claim those promises can only work sufficiently if everyone honors the group’s standards (which are usually directing power toward the leadership).
- Use various forms of image distortion if the leadership doesn’t meet those promises.
Application
The thought and image of something is most likely scarier than the thing itself.
One of the greatest forms of hardship we must endure is the courage to suffer. Feeling things that harm us is painful, but we are responsible for enduring it.
If you feel pain, you can dramatically cut down on its effects by either connecting it to hope in the future or completely disregarding the future altogether.
If death had no consequences, nothing would be serious, which is why most religious people who sincerely believe their afterlife stories have a great sense of humor.
Everyone’s fear of death is why the topic is typically inappropriate in modern polite society, and also why thoughts like suicidal tendencies make people generally feel uncomfortable.
We all must reconcile how to live our lives without fear, given how much death and pain we’re invariably going to experience. Releasing the fear is a difficult lifelong process, but is profoundly worth it.
The healthcare industry (and law enforcement, to a more abstracted degree) concerns itself constantly with death and pain management, so they have an unusual perspective compared to the rest of society.
Since fear is a feeling, it’s fundamentally comparative. Therefore, being gripped by fear can be easily resolved by addressing a much larger fear (e.g., of death), which makes the other fears trivial by comparison.