At this point, I can honestly say I am not afraid of anything happening to me, personally. I am afraid for my loved ones, but I have been through enough now that life is something I can take or leave. There are equally convincing reasons to live as there are to die. I live because that's what my body does if I don't stop it.
This has had a surprisingly liberating effect. It superficially looks like bravery but is much closer to indifferent self-negligence. I have embraced my own suffering as an inescapable facet of human experience, adapting as best I can to an often horrifying reality. This indifference does not extend to the suffering of others however.
If anything it's motivated me to combat cruelty and deceit wherever I see it, in whatever small ways I am able. I have known what it is like to be on the receiving end and now feel a special enmity towards those things. "Opportunistically counter-entropic", if you will pardon the tongue twister.
There are many supernatural concepts that scare people too. I've avoided that by concluding that the problem of interaction makes the supernatural either impossible or irrelevant, as it could never affect us without violating the principle of non-overlapping magisteria. The concept of an "immaterial substance" is self-refuting.
There's enough shit in reality to be afraid of without imagining spooks, spirits, demons and goblins. That's the sort of thing I was afraid of as a child. As a teenager I was afraid of stuff like carjackings, home invasion, bear or shark attacks...still pretty fantastical and improbable, statistically speaking.
It's true that I write horror, frequently with supernatural themes. But more often than not, the fantastical elements of those stories are a metaphor for something from my past. In those cases, the scare factor comes from expressing (in an abstracted way) what it was like to endure those experiences. All effective writing draws on what you know.
Now, what really scares me is stuff like cancer. The idea that I will very probably watch my own parents die slowly from cancer as I look on, powerless to do anything. There are also friends of mine who are at risk for suicide and no matter what I say to them, I can't banish the possibility that I will wake up one day to discover they're dead.
I can handle everything else except that. I don't really know what I'm gonna do. Probably it will destroy me. But I've come back from being destroyed a few times now, each time wondering if it's really "okay" to. Life is a crazy thing.
It's a sad thing when your parents die. My mother died from kidney failure and my dad from gangrene. Even though this wasn't cancer it still was sad and hard to handle.
I also am scared of economic collapse and the dollar losing its value. Ouch...
It is very strong what my friend @alexbeyman wrote. Does very well in expressing. Thank you for sharing something so profound
I feel the same exact way as you. It's more that I'm scared of what will happen to the ones I love and care about.
You are awesome. I'm so sorry life has been and continues to be so painful for you, friend. You deserve happiness.
That's very sweet of you. I don't think I'm alive only to experience happiness, though.
Looks to me like the old saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" applies pretty well to your life. Cancer is indeed a scary thing, but I wouldn't worry about it too much as it's something we have no control over. It'll either happen or it won't. Best to cross that bridge when you come to it, and in the meantime worry about things you actually can control.
My greatest fear is failure. And I don't mean trivial failure like making a bad investment or something... I mean the kind of gut-wrenching, life changing, fundamental kinds of failure: being homeless, not making enough money to put a roof over my head or food on the table, not being able to hold my family together, losing the love of my wife / daughter, being labeled an unproductive / terrible employee, that kind of thing. It's this fear that serves as my primary motivator in life, driving me to work hard and put forth my best effort into whatever endeavors I get involved in. I always have the feeling that I'm just one step away from losing everything I've built, that the wolf is just outside the door, and that gives me a powerful drive to excel and make sure those fears can never become a reality.
I relate to much of that. I don't think our purpose is to be economically productive labor units though. When your product is expressions of human experience (like writing, photography, film, music, etc.) how economically effective you are will follow from how richly you live your life.
I am not afraid to be poor forever. That would be much better than dying atop a mountain of cash, having done cruel things to accumulate it.
I'm not afraid to be poor either, just of not being able to maintain a minimum quality of life to allow me to get by. The phrase "economically productive labor unit" makes me shudder. Sadly I'm a wage slave to a large corporation for the time being, but am actively working to weaken the bars on that particular prison cage, with an eye toward making an escape eventually.