Fear as an Evolutionary Compass | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about fear?
Answer:
- Fear is not an emotion to be conquered but a highly reliable evolutionary compass that modern society has taught us to distrust and override.
- Most “fearless” people are not brave—they are either numb, reckless, or have outsourced their fear response to drugs, ideology, or adrenaline addiction.
- Therapy and self-help culture have pathologized normal fear; being afraid of real dangers (heights, strangers in dark alleys, financial ruin, social rejection) is rational and adaptive, not something to “cure.”
- The obsession with “facing your fears” often creates more trauma than it prevents—some fears exist precisely because the risk is legitimate and the cost of being wrong is permanent (e.g., jumping off buildings, confronting armed intruders, public speaking when you have concrete evidence you’ll be humiliated).
- Comfort is the real enemy of growth, not fear; people who eliminate fear usually just trade it for complacency and mediocrity.
- Chronic low-grade fear (anxiety) is underrated as a performance enhancer—many high achievers secretly run on it and collapse only when they finally “overcome” it.
- Teaching children to never feel fear (through excessive reassurance and helicopter parenting) produces fragile, entitled adults who panic at the first real threat.
- A lot of proclaimed “phobias” are socially acceptable ways to admit you have common sense (e.g., fear of sharks while swimming in the ocean, fear of certain neighborhoods at night).
- Courage is extremely overrated; calculated avoidance is often the smarter, longer-living strategy, yet it’s culturally shamed as cowardice.
- The people who scream loudest about “living without fear” are usually the same ones demanding society remove every conceivable risk so they never have to feel it.
These opinions tend to be unpopular because they clash with the dominant cultural narrative that fear is almost always irrational, limiting, and something to aggressively eradicate.