what’s your biggest fear, not like spiders or heights, the real one
mine’s dying without ever actually making it, like looking back one day and feeling like i failed at life overall
curious what everyone else actually carries around …
Getting to a point of deterioration where suicide becomes a logical choice. That can be health, societal, or environmental.
The thing that scares me the most is a clean windshield on my car.
Don’t get me wrong. I hate having dirt on the windshield. However, I remember a time when in summer I was in a constant battle to clean spattered insects off my windshield. Now I almost never hit an insect.
I haven’t moved. I still drive on the same roads I used to drive on. Either the insects have evolved to avoid roads, or they just aren’t there anymore.
Life on this planet is dying out, and we’re using all our technology and all our resources to allow us to pretend it isn’t. Eventually, the extinction will outpace our ability to compensate, and we’ll all start dying along with everything else.
I don’t actually believe life will cease completely. I think when enough people have died, they planet will recover. However, the millennia between the crash and the recovery will be unpleasant for anyone who manages to survive long enough to experience it. And the deaths of those who don’t survive long enough will be horrifying.
I don’t actually believe life will cease completely.
I saw some documentary thing, that claimed, that even if a huge asteroid glassed the whole planet, the heat would not be able to reach deep enough, for long enough, to kill all the microbes. So life itself may not die, until this planet is swallowed by the expanding sun. If that makes it feel any better.
Yeah, I believe life has survived worse. The pandemic showed that things recover surprisingly quickly once you eliminate people.
It may even be more possible than science believes for us to recover if we really put effort into it. However, it is far less possible that we’ll put any real effort into it before irreversibly catastrophic consequences start happening.
Oh yes, sadly we have been on a crash course for a long while now, and I do not believe we will correct it either. We should obviously not stop trying, but personally I lost hope, when people around me did not care at all, when I learned about the climate change in the early 2000s, and got really into protecting the environment and all. But I do find some solace in the thought, that life continues, even when we do not.
Biggest fear I can’t control: living a life where I get walked over, where nobody seems to care about me but expect me to drop everything for them (wait, that’s my life right now)
Biggest fear I can control: thalassophobia
What are your three biggest fears?
In all seriousness though, basically this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change
Sea level rise is already not a question of if but when and how much.
We’re seeing evidence now that ocean temperature increase is accelerating, and ocean current patterns which have been stable for the entirety of recorded human history are collapsing. There have been several extreme heat events around the globe this year.
So I guess my fear is that I’ll live to see everything descend into bloody, desperate chaos when all the infrastructure we’ve built fails, and food and water scarcity become a daily concern for the entire population.
Loneliness. Without my wife or dog, I would descend into a most dark place.
I’m pretty shocked by how much my mental health has tanked since my dog passed away. I knew losing her would wreck me, but I didn’t realise how much she made my life worth living.
I’m so sorry. I look regularly at my little buddy and nearly weep knowing that I’ll likely outlive him. I mean, I hope I do because he’d be crushed if I didn’t.
Making a small mistake that snowballs into manslaughter.
Man’s laughter, you say?
For a time recently I felt extremely overwhelmed and fearful of the idea that in death there is nothing and your consciousness slips away into a black nothingness and everything I had ever done was completely meaningless and that my existence was for nothing.
Oddly enough knowing that makes me happy because it means there is an escape to a lifetime of minor mistakes my stupid brain won’t let go of. Helps me live in the moment.
Severe physical pain. I’m not really afraid of death, however a gruesome and painful leadup to death is what scares me the most
Being trapped in a country that descends in to rampant transphobia
Modern life, with modern politics, has been scary enough that I struggle to imagine what could scare me anymore. I’ve been homeless three times, I’ve had friends die young, I’ve come to a point of acceptance and I’m not sure if it’s healthy or a sign of being beaten down so much that acceptance is my cope.
The destruction of all life due to a runaway process, e.g. paperclip maximizer or other such maligned goal seeking program
Getting excluded from society.
I’m part of a heavily politicised minority, and the possibility of that minority being (quasi)outlawed/societally shunned is real and very scary.
To a degree that scenario feels like a death sentence.
Being misunderstood and I am living it everyday (neurodivergent).
For me that has come to normality so i formulate everything as precicely as possible (i still get missunderstood)
Yeah it’s not about the cliché potential of misunderstanding and already being under NTs for a few decades I figured most of it out.
However, there are other layers of communication that fail them or me since it’s inherently based on assumptions and social networks (not the technological type).
Yeah. I know. I am highly ND as well. Now even lost my job because of this missunderstanding despite giving a litteral manual with examples: “hey this is how i need you to phrase things for me to understand. And this is what i mean when i say x”
The more adaptable we are, the more it sucks 😕
This happens to me all the time. Like, whenever I go to the doctor, the receptionist will be really nice to my wife and nasty to me and I have no idea what I did!
Watching stuff like the Expanse or the Martian made me realize how much I’m scared of this vast open space. It makes me super uncomfortable to watch those astronauts in these movies often without any form of security doint something outside in space. All I can think of is one tiny asteroid and you are gone. Drifting in this vast empty space, watching all your life control fail over time and just slowly die.
So scary but also veery unlikely to happen to me :DScary thought. Do you get a similar feeling about open ocean or is it space specifically? Not my biggest fear but the idea of swimming in very deep water is very scary to me.
I nearly drowned as a kid and have slight thalassaphobia. Throw me in the ocean and I die from a panic attack ;D
I can’t swim in it. My body just shuts down. Seas and deep rivers are also no option. But the public pool is fine!
Oh wow. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. Can relate, but I’m more in the high discomfort zone than phobia. That almost drowning must have been terrifying. Do you remember it or was it an early infancy thing?
I was 9ish and it was my first time at the beach so I didn’t know anything about undercurrents. The days before were very stormy. So even though I was close to the beach I wasn’t able to get out. Whenever I thought I made it, I was pulled back in and underwater. My mother totally underestimated the situation and watched. Don’t know how long it actually took me but it felt like ages until I managed to crawl out.
That sounds terrifying. This actually reminds me a lot of ‘Deep Water’ by William Douglas, we read it in 12th grade, he went through something really similar as a kid …
Dang, sounds like a really close call. That’ll definitely buy you a phobia.
People can drown / get pulled far into deeper water p easily in some beaches, even in relatively shallow water (chest high). Just a few months ago a guy that owns a well known restaurant here tried to save someone from drowning in a situation similar to yours. He and 2 other people that also tried to help drowned trying to rescue the person, who also didn’t make it. Was all over the news. Some beaches’ll fuck you up.
Thanks for sharing and glad you’re OK.
You normally can’t see the bottom when it’s deep though. What difference does it make if it’s 2m or 200m?
Sea around here is so murky you can barely see past 1m anyway so rarely have any idea how deep it is unless you can touch it.
Probably spending the rest of my life alone.
