The Million Dollar Question

What scares you more than anything else?

It's a simple question. I'm not talking about what fills you with anxiety; a lot of stuff can do that. Anxiety is what you feel when you're walking through a dark forest and hear something move in the darkness. Freaky yes, maybe even a first step to real fear, but not fear unto itself. I'm talking about real, unrestrained fear. Something that happens when your amygdala takes the wheel away from your frontal lobe and steers the car right into the median. Pure, cornered animal terror.

Actually, I don't think that this question can be truthfully answered by most people. I know I can't. I've had moments where I would have bet money that I would be dead in the next few seconds, I'm arachnaphobic, and I'm amazingly insecure, and yet I still don't think I can do it. If you can answer this question truthfully, you probably don't even want to think about it, let alone say it. Real fear is the kind of thing that scars us for life; the stuff of PTSD. The cause of it almost has to be death, or at least severe harm. You lose total control of yourself. All you want to do is escape. You'll do it by any means necessary, even if that means to kill. Can you justify killing if you're too high on adrenaline to restrain yourself because you were reduced to a frightened cornered animal that would do anything to survive?

People claim that they are afraid of a lot of things. Change, loneliness, being misunderstood, commitment; these are just some of the bullshit things that people claim scare them. That's not fear. Sure, they may be some legitimate issues that cause a great deal of stress and axiety, but it's not fear. I wonder how someone who has experienced true fear views these kind of things. Do they see it as a farce; worthless fretting over ultimately meaningless issues? Do they become amplified, creating more fear? Do they fill you with joy by the simple fact of being around to feel them?

And yet, despite our innate aversion to fear, we can't help but want to flirt with it. I suppose that's why this time of year is so popular. I'm especially thinking of haunted houses. We actually pay money to people who let us walk through a series of rooms where we experience a brief glimpse of what it feels like to lose control to fear. And lose control some people do. I walk through haunted houses and admire the production values, but I've had grown adults grab onto me and try to climb me like some kind of cat tree; sometimes even complete strangers. Why do we do it? So we know what it feels like to be really afraid? I don't think so. No matter how believable a haunted house is, we know in the back of our minds that it's fake and that we're in no real danger. If one of those zombie clowns actually walked up to you and grabbed you around the throat and started squeezing, then you'd really freak out. Adrenaline junkies are similar but a little different. Jumping out of airplanes, base jumping, rock climbing, it's all just different approaches to the same idea: fake fear. I don't want to just write this off as some form of emotional masturbation. This is toying with our survival instincts. We do it for an easy reason: to prove our intellectual superiority over more primative drives. We like to think that we can look the devil in the eye and not flinch, but let's face it: we're still animals. Our simple brains are there for a reason, and that is that they keep us alive. Therefore, since I believe that my body knows what's best for me, I try to avoid such negative vibes. Why try to feel afraid when I can do something to feel happy, often with less effort, like actual masturbation.

So what scares you more than anything else? I have no idea, and probably neither do you, and I think it's best that we keep it that way.