Walk through any department store in October and you'll find an entire industry devoted to frightening people for fun. Turn on the television and you'll find murder documentaries, disaster predictions, economic collapse warnings, climate catastrophes, political outrage, and enough true crime programming to make you afraid of your own mailbox. Open social media and there is always someone warning you about what should terrify you next.
Then we scratch our heads and ask why anxiety rates are skyrocketing.
Maybe we're asking the wrong question.
The question isn't why people are afraid. The question is why we've built so much of modern life around manufacturing fear.
Fear was designed to help us survive the occasional bear.
Instead, we've created a society that delivers bears to our nervous systems twenty-four hours a day.
The human brain struggles to distinguish between an immediate threat and a vividly imagined one. Every headline, horror movie, catastrophe prediction, and worst-case scenario rehearsed in our minds becomes another practice session for fear. Then we declare war on fear itself. We buy books to conquer it. Take courses to eliminate it. Search for hacks to overcome it. Yet the more attention fear receives, the larger it appears.
It's as if we've spent decades trying to extinguish a fire by pouring gasoline on it.
Just the other day, a client said to me, "I realize I avoid everything because I'm afraid of being afraid."
She wasn't kidding. When we have made fear loom larger in our life than it needs to, we start looking for ways to seek comfort in the midst of our own fearful imaginings. And when seeking comfort, or being comfortable, or living inside our own "comfort zone" is a big enough priority—complacency naturally follows.
We start saying things like, "Oh no, we're not able to make it. It might rain that day."
"I don't do crowds. No thanks." "I am not interested in being anywhere involving lots of steps."
"Babies and I don't get along." "No, I don't do vegetarian anything."
Once complacency sets in and we become comfortable with it, we start avoiding as a lifestyle. Which leads to isolation, which leads to disconnection from both self and others, which ultimately leads to a miserable life with or without active addiction(s) attached. Active addictions such as whatever works to provide us with our own radical escapes from reality on demand. Too much working, too much exercising, too much researching, too much reading, too much volunteering, too much giving until we collapse, too much rescuing stray animals—and these are the more "acceptable" forms of escape in our culture by the way! We already know what the not-so-acceptable forms of escape are. We read about those every day.
Courage is not the absence of fear. Emotional health is not the absence of fear. Resilience is not the absence of fear. They are the ability to continue living meaningfully in the presence of fear—and in spite of it whenever it shows up.
We have been sold a false promise about fear in our culture, which is this:
"If you do enough work in whatever form that takes, you will eventually stop feeling afraid."
But that's not how healthy people function. Healthy people still feel fear. They just don't organize their lives around it. Many people aren't suffering because reality is dangerous. They're suffering because they've developed a habit of treating discomfort, uncertainty, embarrassment, rejection, grief, conflict, and change as if they were emergencies.
With this way of thinking, the nervous system never gets a day off. We have become a civilization that treats ordinary human vulnerability as a five-alarm fire. We need to practice living in peace in spite of the storms around us, and in spite of the chaos, crisis, and mayhem that we witness. Nobody can rob us of our peace or our joy unless we allow him/her/them to do it.
The most fearless generations were probably not the generations that talked about fear the most.
They were too busy building businesses, raising children, serving in wars, immigrating to new countries, starting farms, opening stores, and figuring out how to make it through another winter. Not because they lacked fear. Because they had purposes bigger than fear. That may be the real antidote.
Not fearlessness. Purpose.
Fear says: "What if something bad happens?"
Purpose says: "Maybe. But I have things to do anyway."
What do you need to be doing anyway—besides wasting time living in an attempt to avoid hard things?
Until next post...