Something worth avoiding
You’ve heard of it; it’s so ubiquitous that even its own insidy cannot occlude it entirely. It makes itself obvious in cases like being afraid to leap from a tall building or to cross a highway, but even in those cases we can be afraid to admit it. In these cases, although it’s too strong to avoid, it’s also obvious enough to clearly be the cause. Identifying it as the cause is very empowering. When it is apparent then even its great strength can be overcome by will.
You may ask, however, what happens when the fear is too weak to be obvious, yet strong enough to influence our behavior? It’s a dangerous circumstance for sure; how can we fix a problem when we don’t know its cause? We have a will to fight something within, but what exactly are we fighting? We really can’t fight it effectively, but the problems themselves are so significant that maybe just maybe if we can identify how fear manifests itself, how it hides itself so well, where it tends to crop up, and under whose guise it tends to appear, we can conclude this admittedly masterful masquerade.
I won’t address the obvious places fear crops up, because those patterns are both universally known and wholly inadequate to identify the real perpetrator. Instead, there are cases where only in retrospect and when you are sufficiently distant from the situation would you quietly admit to yourself that you were afraid. When you were afraid, not to jump off a building, but to try a little harder; the times you were afraid to discover that things weren’t as you expected them to be. You may recall being afraid to study for a test because despite telling yourself that you’d “do really well if you tried” you’d much rather not know. What if you really were just dumb? What if no matter how hard you tried you’d only do a little better? You convinced yourself that you would much rather maintain that uncertainty than actually try, and your throughput suffers accordingly.
Unfortunately, fear under this guise still seems completely reasonable in the moment. With a little personification: Fear says: “You’d be so heartbroken if you tried and failed! By leaving it uncertain you completely avoid that misfortune” But beware; fear is polar. In fear you view the world through a darker lens. A lens by which the downside always far outweighs the upside. It makes sense that it would; fear manifested as a behavior to protect you. Usually we have insufficient information to make accurate predictions about deadly situations, so anywhere there is even the slightest probability of mortality the expected value is completely disregarded and mortality is assumed. Those decisions of yester-millenia were almost always life or death, and death was such a huge downside evolutionarily that it was far better to just always take the safer route. When survival of a species is at stake, better safe than sorry is the way to go.
On the other hand, the world is now a highly complex system and the same feeling of fear has applied itself to non-mortal situations. That huge risk-aversion prevents you from making big decisions; instead you take the default route wherever necessary.
In aggregate survival scenarios risk-aversion is the way to go, but independently, if you can make calculated decisions, you should. This is where fear comes in. As a population, fear helps us, but as individuals -in non-mortal situations- it hurts us.
Fear can still be overcome, but it must be overcome intentionally. It must be identified and systematically eliminated. Acknowledging its presence and addressing it as your adversary is the first step. The road from there is tough but straightforward.
Also, keep in mind that fear isn’t always wrong. Far from it, fear’s actually a remarkably accurate quick judgment. A lightning fast pattern matching process formed by centuries of evolution and years of your own experience isn’t something to laugh at. It’d be dangerous to just automatically counteract it without reason, but it should always be questioned. If you have time to make a real decision, then it’s to your advantage to do a much more thorough risk analysis. You’ll find that fear hyper-inflates the disadvantages in these analyses, so quantify whatever you can. How much money could you lose? Fear says all of it! but upon a closer look you discover reality to be far more forgiving. Question fear like a poorly behaved child questions authority, because that’s exactly what you’re trying to do.