Fear and forget

No, it is not "Fire and Forget", the apt description-nickname for fully autonomous homing missiles (to distinguish it from semi-autonomous and fully guided missiles, that must be kept  under control of the launcher for at least a part of their flight). Fear and Forget, the mainstays of modern life.

Fear of a ton of things that we have no control of and, reasonably, hardly a chance of ever meeting in our lives.

Fear of Islamic Terrorist (when they will made, per year, as many deaths as cars, I will fear them... maybe), fear of "Terrible illnesses that could spread beyond control" (Remember Ebola? The SARS? hybridization of swine and human viruses? Yes.... terrible dangers, that didn't come this way), of a large size meteorite destroying the planet (really?), of global warming (why? I will be dead long before the ocean rises the ten meters that it needs to reach my house), of man-made wide extinction (yes, we are pruning evolutionary trees as fast as any known "great extinction"... which have been a few! Fifty millions years after we are gone, Intelligent ground-Cephalopods will scorch the Earth like we did, probably using our cities, converted by time in massive concentrations of metals and stuff, as mines to get the resources to prop their civilization up) and of other things like this.

Forget the fact that, no matter what, we are going to die.

Even if  one behaves in the most prudential manner, follows all the dietary fashions proposed by physicians (why, fashions? because, year after year, one discovers that the risks or fat have been exaggerated to hide those of sugars, on behalf of the U.S.A. sugar industry, that cholesterol fat in the blood is hardly influenced by one's diet and that the single most intelligent thing one way do to raise his or her life expectancy s to move in an area with little or no polluting industries ), avoid risk-taking of any form... he is going to die.

That life saving diet... gives one  maybe five more years. It doesn't really save his or her life.- physicians like that point of view because it makes their work seem more important - it postpones death for a while more, a while in which, we could add, he'll hardly do anything worth notice.

In the end, you'll die. And all that you have done in your life... usually, amounts to little or nothing.

Accumulating some wealth, or wasting the few you were endowed in heredity..

Some lucky, lucky bastards will have created something that will last a little but, how many can realistically say this?

Have you the talent to, say, paint something that in a hundred year will be deemed worth keeping, and not simply thrown away as an outdated crust?

What have you done on the job, today? How long will it last?

As 60 percent of people is employed in services, in a modern country, chances are that you have spent your day speaking to other that work in another branch of services, who didn't understand anything and will soon pester again for a fix-up.A week after you retire, your work will already be gone an forgotten.

So, modern life is, mostly, doing meaningless if not wasteful jobs (telemarketing? auto-referential bureaucracy? internet censorship in China? "What have you done today?"   "I zapped a thousand bloggers that  wrote that we arrested human right activists!" "Good!, the country needs patriots like you" ), usually ten times more stressful than those of our fathers, while we fear for the most idiotic things and we forget that we are NOT immortals.

That we are going to die anyway, without accomplishing anything - because our job was idiotic from the very beginning.

I know the reasons why some of these happen - promoting fear is a way to get people to open up the wallet, which is the reason why any stupid illness becomes a pandemic threat, asteroids are missing Earth by a (two million miles wide) hair and terrorists are wherever and kills like (a 1/200th of) cars.

Behind each fear, you find some actor interested in getting funds and media interested in boosting their audience, each earning their dough from these scares.

Rarely there is anything more than this... so, there is a simple solution to all this  fearmongering.

Calm down, and write a casual chain of events that could get you affected, and try to assign a probability to each, remembering that the final is the product of the probability of each step.

Than compare the value you got to, say, the probability of simply dying of a stroke in the same time horizon.

The most simple example, the damn asteroid.

It is true... asteroids reach Earth and provoke massive extinctions. Once every 50-60 million years?

SO, what is the probability that I die out of a Asteroid fall? one in a million and a half? (more like, one in two millions).

What is the probability that I die of a stroke from here to when I  am 72? 20% ? More? Something like that.

I do not care about my high pressure enough to pursue a better diet, why should I care for an asteroid at all?

Islamic terrorist attacks in USA, since 2001? Excluded 9/11 (statistically, that's an outlier, and shouldn't be considered) ? 21; with 9/11 and its 2996 death, it is 3017

Vehicular deaths in the USA in the same period? About 600.000  .

In the USA, cars represent - to an average someone's life - a danger 200 times bigger than Islamic terrorism - cars kills more than 30000 a year (down from the 40000+ of 2001-2008),.

If you do not add the 9/11 event - statistically, it is an outlier and it is a good policy to not consider events so far from the average - in the 15 years since 2011 Islamic extremism in the USA claimed 21 persons.

Cars claimed something more than 600000 deaths, in the same period.

Am I scared of cars enough to drive slowly and keep a safe distance at all time? - OK, I admit it, I am.

So I may devoid a 1/3000th of the same attention to potential terrorists.

But not much more than that. - I refuse to devote any more than that, to the work of a bunch of idiots (or, if you prefer, of pence-less Goebbels, if you subscribe to the "terrorism is just propaganda" theory). 

Climatic change and the great extinction? I will miss shrimps, in my old age - apart that, I have no offspring so, if our species wipes out itself and the whole biosphere, after I am gone, why the fuck should I even care?

My home is 10 meters above the sea -  not much, but I should just see the beach finally reach in front of home, right before I die.

Every time they tell you that you should fear something, take a step back, and CHECK the FUCKING FACTS..

In most cases, the great fear is unwarranted, the object of the scare highly unlikely to involve you or anybody near you.

In some others, it is entirely made-up (do you remember the scare for the Satanists and their black masses involving kids, in the '90s? In the end, nothing definitive ever came out, to prove that there ever was anything real behind the urban legend).

So, take a step back. Take two, and you'll feel your butt crashing on the fingers of the fear-mongers, while they try to get into your wallet.

As for death, that is the only great certainty.

Accept it. You are going to be dead, anytime soon (100 years is really nothing).

If your wok isn't leading you in any place, and usually it does not, don't toy with the idea that it's only for a while and then you'll do something better.

It may be true, but you may still be doing the same shit, fifteen years from now.

Decide, whether you accept its lack of meaning - and you'll have to find somewhere else a reason to stay alive,  say, in your family - and keep on, or reject it - and start planning how and when to get out of it.

You are going to die - there is no cure for death, it can only be slightly delayed..

So, don't let the "lives saved" sway you -  it is some years added, till something else arrives, and some of these years may be of quite dubious quality. 

Memento mori - remember that you must die, anyway.

Our ancestors used to, and we have no more reasons than them to forget it.