The real risk we are all taking
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What are you afraid of?
I’m afraid of aging. I’m afraid of becoming irrelevant. I’m afraid of not being good enough in the eyes of others. And while you might have opinions about my fears, you’ll also have fears of your own.
Fear can be useful; it’s a survival mechanism designed to protect us. But some fear is unhelpful and even debilitating.
Take flying. I used to fly without a care in the world. But over the last five years, I’ve developed a very real and very inconvenient fear. I’d sooner get a train, bus or skateboard to my destination than fly. I’ve even excused my way out of holidays and family get-togethers. Why? Because of fear. Irrational, inexplicable out of the blue fear. We’re more likely to be crushed by a vending machine or become a millionaire than die in a plane crash. But that’s not what fear tells me. When I board a flight, it’s like I’m dancing with death. And the warm-up begins weeks before any journey.
My fear of flying is about control, or a lack thereof. It’s about putting my fate in someone else’s hands, something I’ve spent years learning not to do. When we’re kids, we have very little fear because our fate naturally rests in the hands of others. Whatever guardian we are with, is home and home — all being well — is safe. But once we experience the heady scent of rule over our lives, we want more. And it starts young.
We get given pocket money and are allowed to decide what to do with it. Then we pick Christmas and birthday gifts, and next we ask someone to the school dance. Later we go out, get drunk and come home when we choose, then we pick what to study and where.
All that’s fun, but control shifts. Soon, it isn’t about the small stuff; it’s about how to navigate the world and what happens as a consequence. Control is paying bills, managing a team, deciding how to parent and what color to paint your kitchen.
The scariest thing I’ve done? Fall in love. Falling in love with a partner, a friend, a job and an ideal. To fall in love is the most romantic thing we can do precisely because we give everything we have with no guarantees. It’s beautiful because it’s terrifying — we offer our whole selves knowing it could be taken away at any moment. That doesn’t just take courage; it demands surrender.
Relinquishing control is terrifying. It’s also exhilarating — that moment between terror and thrill when you’re not quite sure which way you’ll fall. That’s why there are industries built on erotica like “50 Shades of Grey.” Adults want control; they also want to lose it. Society has created safe-ish ways to appease this freedom-fear cocktail. We can climb heights, dive depths and throw ourselves off and out of things to get a hedonistic shot. Situations in which we know there’s no great threat. Because if we honestly thought there were, we wouldn’t do it.
Of course, some fear is real and warranted. The fear of losing a child or the paycheck that feeds your family. But flying? Irrational as my fear is, irrationality is common.
Mark is afraid of 3am, Dan is afraid of aliens, and Sabeen is afraid of lizards. I once met a woman who was afraid of bananas. Her sister had a phobia of pineapples. And anatidaephobia is the fear that somewhere, somehow a duck is watching you.
Fears are fascinating because they reveal how our minds can latch onto the most ordinary things and make them into monsters. We might laugh at the thought of a duck stalking someone, but to that person the fear is as real as my sweaty palms at 40,000 feet. Fear doesn’t care about logic. It slips past rationale and grabs hold of something deeper, something that doesn’t speak the language of reason.
Maybe we get less afraid as we age. I’d like to believe that. It’s nice to think I’ll care less what the world makes of me as my years add up. I also hope that fear — if it must exist — becomes more meaningful. Less about aging and irrelevance, more about the things that truly matter: leaving words unsaid, not living authentically, people never knowing how deeply they’re adored.
It will all come to an end. Hopefully not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day, and it’s closer than we care to admit. So perhaps we embrace fear while we can.
Because the scariest thought is having lived so safely we never lived at all.
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