The Fear

I fear a lot of things. Awkward social interactions (if I think someone's going to be annoyed with me, if they've a history of being annoyed with me, if I think things are going to go badly quite quickly and so on), fire, the people I care about getting hurt, my bank balance... normal stuff. But fear is a primal reaction, isn't it? It's something we've had for years that's mean to trigger a fight or flight response and while it's possible to overcome your fear, so stare it down and make it something you don't fear any more, it's a little difficult depending on what degree of brown it may or may not inflict upon your trousers.
So why are we also afraid of really stupid things?
Triskeidekaphobia makes me wonder how neurotic we've become as a species that some people actively fear the number 13. I mean, that's in the same realm as burning people for witchcraft because they're old and have a cat, in a way. It's a superstitious throwback to an old time, surely it shouldn't dominate your life.
Phobophobia is confusing. That sounds like a perpetual motion mechanism to me. Being scared of phobias... it's like that speech about having nothing to fear but fear itself.
I wonder if there's a fear of facing your fears? A fear of not actually having any phobias? When society advances, will we have words for fear of new things? Cyborgs? Clones?

My own fears are, I feel, largely rational, but there are some very odd ones:
Butterflies - I've never been able to understand this. The way they flap in your faces freaks me the hell out. I've woken up as a child with a spider crawling on my FACE and I'm not scared of them. It was a little traumatic, too.
Pob - I can't explain this, either, but I'm probably more terrified of him than anything else. Google it, it's a puppet from an old channel 4 TV show that used to spit at the TV screen. It's by the people who made Rosie and Jim, the Teletubbies and in the night garden and every character in that night garden show has his eyes... ugh...
Rotten food - I think this relates back to a time when I didn't realise that my milk had expired, then tried to drink it 2 years ago. This one makes sense, my body should realise that this is bad food and that it shouldn't be eaten, but for it to actively make my skin crawl...

And yet we're sort of obsessed with fear. We have horror movies depicting horrible, horrible ways to die, we have theme park rides that have health warnings, we tell ghost stories and are fascinated with the odd, the strange and the surreal. I've done it myself, I've actively gone seeking things that scare me a little. Is it some desensitisation mechanism? Do we need that little rush every so often to feel more alive? Maybe we need that primal connection at times.
I hope someone, somewhere decides to start a university course on "weird shit that people do", because I'm sure this goes beyond the realm of psychology. I really am.

Fear and loathing in Cas Vegas

I don't understand fear. Alright, I don't understand people much either, but fear, fear is really messed up.
People will say there's two reactions to any situation that you're scared of, fight or flight. The desire to run away like a chipmunk or to suddenly become The Fury. I don't agree with this. Let's take an example here:
You're on a road. A car is approaching that you didn't see and you don't have any time to think, you need to react NOW. What do you do?



Right, the correct answer is stand dithering in the road trying to think because there's a bloody great car trundling towards you and you're not equipped to cope with that.
Fear is like one of the most primal feelings we have. It's what keeps us from killing ourselves in particularly stupid ways. Um... it's what keeps MOST of us from doing that. It's just strange that we still need such a very base reaction in order to properly keep ourselves in check. We don't have any natural predators aside from other humans, we don't need to be afraid of spiders and snakes unless we live in places that are too hot to reasonably support human life anyway, so... why is fear still around, then?
What's worse, we have signs and safety standards, rules and suggestions to minimise the amount of times we have to have a brown trousers experience, so why do we inflict NEW ones on ourselves? Work deadlines, horror movies, social anxiety, crime, warnings of epidemics and financial collapse, it's all mad. All these different problems that you just CAN'T run from and that offer no target for a fight, either.
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that humanity was never intended to live in modern society. Life was never intended to. We do all these strange things that conflict directly with our own personal needs and desires and we think we're doing a good job. You've seen dolphins, right? Bunch of really happy looking little blighters. Now consider how many times a dolphin has decided to form a team to discuss the pod's change management strategy in this financial quarter.
I'd like to see the next 200 years or so. See if we ever do manage to automate everything that doesn't require any form of creative thinking or innovation. It'd be nice to think that some day, not too far from now, the only jobs that people will do will be playing music and writing screenplays.
And they'll only do it for a hobby. If you like playing the flute, you can play it for the sheer pleasure of the thing and for making people happy. That's why I need to conquer the world, really. I do know what's best for us, in the long run.
Well, what's best for me. And maybe the people I care about, I suppose. Really, that's all that matters. The rest of all y'all may well be converted into fuel or cyborgs, it depends on how I feel. I guess what I'm saying is that it might be best to start sucking up now, before I'm too drunk with absolute power to notice.