Fear and Gambling

A while ago I wrote about death and how I am not afraid of it.  There's an implication there that some people draw, that is to say that I do not fear anything, that is not true.  I do have fears but most of them are irrational.  They relate to things that there is no rhyme nor reason to, and as they are not based in logic or reason they are hard to disprove.

It's odd to use the word "disprove" with fear as that implies belief but when you stop and think about fear and what it actually is, at its core fear is a belief that something bad or negative will happen if a given consequence occurs.  For example, I have an irrational fear of wasps and bees.  Now some who share my fear will argue that isn't irrational and give many arguments for why it is perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them.  The trouble is, most of those arguments are based in eccentricity or hysteria.  Take for example the belief that you can die from an allergic reaction to a wasp sting, whilst this is technically possible, the odds of you dying in a plane crash or a train derailment are much higher, and yet most people who are afraid of wasps are perfectly comfortable riding on planes or trains.

Fears inevitably involve statistics, experience, and most importantly, hearsay.  There are those who posit that fears are in their entirety subject to nurture rather than nature.  That every fear is learned and therefore if you prevent someone from ever learning to fear something then they would have no fear of it.  That is easily disproved by unexpectedly popping a balloon or causing some other loud noise, there is a primal instinct to associate such sudden sensory overload with being something harmful.  There is a rush of adrenaline to power the fight or flight mechanism, to give you the energy to fight whatever is a threat to you or to run away.

Truly irrational fears however have no basis in experience, nor do they have a basis in perception of others who share those fears.  I have known people who were afraid of baked beans, or coleslaw.  For my American readers, baked beans are a type of Haricot Bean or Boston Bean that's been boiled in tomato sauce.  There's no reason whatsoever to fear these things, they can't cause you any physical harm, they are inanimate, and there's no prior experience you could envision where beans themselves attacked you or gave reason for you to hate them, still of all that fear remained for them.

None of my irrational fears involve food, which for anyone who knows me will come as no surprise as there are days when I eat everything in sight.  Most people find it amusing that I am not afraid of the things you're meant to be afraid of - death for example - but I am afraid of things that most people are not.  There inevitably comes the question of what the worst case scenario may be if those fears were fulfilled, most people assume that all fear is related to death and that any irrational fear is related to an irrational death scenario - being killed by baked beans.  For me, there is no fear of what happens after, there is only the fear of the event itself.  I'm not afraid of walking around with a red mark on my skin from a wasp sting etc, it's the event itself that I fear - in other words the anticipation of what might happen is what paralyses me, not what happens after nor the consequences.

With fears traditionally the way to overcome them is through confidence, reassurance, and exposure.  With an irrational fear those three things aren't usually possible.  The fear itself is not based in reason, so no amount of education about the reality of such experiences will cause any ease.  Likewise exposure becomes an incredibly difficult topic to broach if there is a real negative side affect that could occur.  In the case of the fear of wasps, being exposed repeatedly to wasps would not likely build confidence that they will not sting you, it would likely lead to you being stung.  As for the outcome, however statistically unlikely it would be for you to have an allergic reaction, the more you expose yourself to that situation the higher the odds become of having such a reaction.

If one in a million planes crash, the more planes you ride, the closer you get to that statistic - of course like all forms of gambling there is no guarantee you would actually experience the event at all.  Odds of 1 in 4 do not mean you will definitely win once every 4 times you play, but sooner or later with those odds you would win.  Fear and Gambling therefore share a lot of similarities, both deal with statistics, both deal with hypothetical outcomes, and both reinforce your beliefs that such events will happen more frequently the more you take that risk.  The only key difference is that gambling deals with something that you want to happen but almost always will not, whereas fear deals with something you do not want to happen, and again, almost always will not - despite how much we try to convince ourselves it will.