It is a lazy afternoon, January 1, 2002. Do you describe yourself as portrayed by the drawing below? Worried, fearful, concerned about what's in store for the new year?
Or, are you like the one in the photo below?
I thought about it a few years back. It may have been a year or two after I retired when I mused about how best to manage fears about this and that. Below is the updated version.
We, as a species, who claim to have the only rational mind are also capable of harboring the most irrational fear over anything and everything. We have a list of phobias and we would inevitably create one if something we feel just now is not on it. While fear is a necessary survival instinct for our species, we accessorized it with worry and turned the latter into a cottage industry. It is ironic that as concerns over the most basic of human needs - food, clothing and shelter - may have diminished for those of us living in the industrialized world, our capacity to worry has expanded exponentially. Now imagine what it is like when those basic needs are constantly in the minds of those less fortunate, whether living in either developed or underdeveloped economies of the world. But, worry we do. So, aside from worrying about keeping the proverbial new year's resolutions, 2022, like all previous years is fraught with our real and imagined concerns, not the least of which is the current worry about the scourge of Covid and its variants.
With worry is our inability to discern the likelihood of an event and its consequence to us when it happens. We worry about low probability, high catastrophic impact events versus those that are likely to affect us, which we actually ignore. Here is a list as a way to help us manage our fears. It is more than just a list because I hope it will shape our attitude as we ponder each of them.
1.) Airline crashes worry us so much that quite a number will never want to travel by air, or we are just simply mortified when we do. In billions of passenger miles the airline is by far the safest mode of transportation by multiple factors versus land transportation. The Vietnam War went on for ten years and almost fifty thousand American soldiers died. During that same period of ten years, almost half a million Americans died on its freeways and city streets - men, women, young and old, children, professionals and blue collar workers, many in the prime of their lives. The low probability event of an airline crash catches our attention but a relatively high probability event of a traffic accident, especially among teenagers and drunk drivers, do not make it to the list of irrational fears we had managed to compile in our head. Meanwhile, do you still want to travel by air as we witness on TV the sad manifestations of human nature in how a few passengers are coping with what the pandemic has done to their behavior? However rare those unfortunate incidents are we no longer look forward to flying.
3.) Overly enthusiastic golfers who played through a misty, overcast afternoon are hit by lightning. It's in the news; it stokes our deep-seated fear of lightning. More people die, however, from electrical accidents at home while, again, doing mundane chores like fixing a light fixture, working with electric power tools outside on the same misty afternoon as those golfers did; in fact, it's worst for those who fixed light fixtures using ladders on misty afternoons. But we fear lightning more - statistically a very low probability event versus being electrocuted by a faulty wiring system at home. A housewife in Nebraska or Idaho will be fearful of a shark attack although the likelihood of her ever even dipping her toes into a gentle surf is infinitely small compared to the many times she will drive her car to the grocery store or to visit relatives fifty miles away. Shark attacks and bites from rattlesnakes are rarer than death from choking over food but we worry more about fangs and serrated teeth than biting off more than we can chew.
4.) And it must come to this - global warming! You know it was coming. Global warming will cause all kinds of disasters, the destruction of our environments, the dying off of species that would include us, the California field mice, the snail darter fish (remember, it was responsible for the delay in building a dam for hydroelectric power), etc. I have news for the extinction-mongers. Of all the species that had ever lived throughout earth's long history, 95% have become extinct over eons. The 5% surviving species that you see today, including the diversity of the human population, are thriving and are the results of constantly evolving with the changes in environment and conditions - the fluctuations between cooling and warming of the earth. The world we inhabit today had seesawed between several ice ages and global warming over millions of years. And that's not counting changes in earth's magnetic poles and the occasional asteroid hit (which killed off the mighty dinosaurs which brought about the emergence of mammals, and then us, of course).
The dinosaurs were the top species during160 million years of their existence. They had experienced, as one would imagine, countless environmental changes throughout. Imagine further, the supreme council of dinosaurs meeting over the concerns on the increase in volcanic activities and rising sea levels, small mammals multiplying to fill a small niche, and the oceans were producing all kinds of creatures the dinosaurs could not control. They all worried and called for measures to regulate all of that. Every concern they can think of was duly noted. Then one day an errant asteroid, perhaps the size of Mt. Everest, wandered into the solar system and hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico. All that reptilian worrying by the council of dinosaurs was all for naught. The good news - other species emerged and survived. A particular one became dominant. Endowed with great intelligence and capacity to organize, it is now the dominant species. With an intelligent mind came an incredible ability to solve problems. However, we also developed an irresistible capacity to worry. And worry a lot we do (by the way, that's Yoda speak for you Star Wars fans).
We did thrive with great success and diversity. The Masai grew tall and lean and developed darker pigments to deal with the oppressive heat of the equatorial sun and protection from excessive ultraviolet rays ; the diminutive bush people (pygmies, if you will) became shorter and smaller to easily navigate the thick vegetation of the forest floors; citizens of the tropics didn't need too much dark skin so they opted for brown though for those closer to the temperate zone became paler and those in the upper northern regions just simply lost pigmentation, except for the occasional freckles, but allowing for the desired absorption of Vitamin D from the sun. So the differences in skin color and physical stature are marvels of adaptation and not reasons for discriminating one race over another.
Here's the lesson from the dinosaurs. They had a long list of things to worry about. The one that was not on the list happened. Let's assume for a moment that global warming is for real. Actually it is - every summer. We all long for Winter to be over, harken to Spring to watch flowers bloom and for many to see the sun for the first time in months. Then the lovely golden days of Summer. If not for global warming of the earth, we would still be covered with body hair - it would be called fur - to stay warm. Instead, the warming up has led to the invention of the Frisbee, baseball as America's pastime and Spring gets the young and not so young men to eagerly await the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition to hit the stands or their mailboxes. If not for warm days, lazy afternoons will make no sense at all and the expression, "go fly a kite", may not have been coined to serve as an irreverent retort by someone who had just lost an argument.
So you ask, "should we not be fearful or worry at all?". Fear is good, worry is not so. Try this. Make a list of what you worried about from a year ago, last month, last week, yesterday even. How many did actually happen? Probably none. That's not to say that nothing bad ever does happen in our lives. It's just not the ones we spent nights worrying about. Global warming did not cause the plague that wiped out 25% of Europe, nor the flu of 1914-17 (or whenever that was in the early 1900s). In fact, flu disappears in the summer because people are not cooped up indoors during the cold months because they are up and about enjoying the warm days. Some of us don't like fossil fuels (oil in other words) for producing electricity to run our refrigerators to preserve and keep our foods safer, nor for refineries to process the very bottom of crude to produce asphalt that pave roads at the cheapest cost so transportation can get to the most isolated areas of human communities or for ambulances to get to the sick and the injured more quickly.
Then you ask. How then should we manage our fears? We don't. We use fear to stay vigilant and careful, to instill discipline and to avoid doing stupid things. And Yoda would say, "Worry, however, we should not". Worrying is like treading water. You could expend a lot of energy doing it but it gets you nowhere. So, you might as well swim and go somewhere.
Still anxious over anything and everything? I have four words, "Don't Worry About It"
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