The Fear.less staff
Today is a Saturday, a balmy summer morning, a couple days after my quietly-celebrated 40th birthday. Everybody around the house seems not distant, necessarily, but reserved. It’s eerie. My son and my brother decide we’re gonna go out golfing for a few hours.
I know what’s going on here, because I have seen it happen many times. The golfing outing is a distraction for all my friends and family to show up at my enormous surprise party. Politely, I stay quiet and feign ignorance while outgolfing my family. At 3:00 p.m. we begin the trip back. The car pulls into the driveway. I walk out back, preparing my plumb-flustered face.
No one is there. There is no party. What the hell? Why?
Because I thought about it first.
This is an extrapolation of a fanciful idea I had a couple years ago that I called, to be as pretentious as possible, contrarian determinism. It means that stuff doesn’t happen to you only because you imagined that it might happen, and the universe hates you. Do you think you’re going to find your wallet when you go back to the restaurant? Well it’s gone forever. Do you think you aced your exam? B-.
And it only works to hurt you. So you can’t imagine your best friend dying in all sorts of horribly brutal accidents and make him immortal.
There is a little truth to this idea, unrelated to fate. Running scenarios in your head like movie scripts is a common preparation technique for job interviews and dates but sometimes it can severely derail you when you’re caught unaware by a diversion from your imagination. But it is clear that this idea is also the epitome of diffidence. After years of being assured variations of “anything is possible if you just believe”, I came to almost seriously think that “what you want is impossible, just because you believe it. You, specifically.”
When we are afraid, we begin to subscribe to philosophies of fear. With our limited, fear-stained experiences, we construct a framework for a dreary ontology.
In reality, “nothing ever goes my way” is always false when said by a living thing. Instead of classifying and varnishing the architecture of our pessimism, giving it a name and joking about it with out friends, let’s try knocking it down.
It can pose a challenge. When something I was looking forward to gets postponed or cancelled, my kneejerk reaction is to blame it on myself for having fantasized about it first. This is ridiculous.
Many of the Fear.less contributors laud the importance of mental training, of wiring the brain to just not lend any credence to that insanity. And you, and I, should listen. Because you just can’t go on thinking that the universe is fundamentally opposed to you.
Danielle,
I recently listened to your call with Pamela Slim, and discovered your site that way. I am glad that you’ve pushed on through in spite of adversity, otherwise this site probably would not exist.
I do not think the Universe is opposed to us. Even the most successful people fail or have things go wrong. Heck, they probably have them go wrong more often than right.
How we come away from something matters more.
-Tom
thank you for your comments. your optimism is right on the money and what we want to help people work toward and maintain.
also, i am not danielle. i am matt, that guy listed under “deputy editor” in the fear.less credits. i see where you might have gotten that idea though, what with her being on the cover and me pretending to be 40 in this post. i do love danielle though, as you can probably see from reading various other blog entries. i can’t stop giggling though. happens all the time.