What are you afraid of?

[catherine]

What I fear most is being totally under the autocratic control of other people, with me having zero control and zero possibility of escaping no matter how much I hate what they are doing to me. Examples: nursing home, jail, severe illness where I have to just lay there and let them do whatever they want to.

I think deep down everyone has that fear as their biggest fear, even if they don't admit it.

Rats? Yeah being eaten alive by rats would be horrible. But what makes it horrible is you having no control over the situation and no way to escape. Being trapped in a small space? Same thing. And so on....

I am not disagreeing, but...

I think there's a point at which SOME people (saints, mystics and other highly evolved people) can overcome the fear of control. Victor Frankl famously said "The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Admittedly, there aren't many people who can achieve that, but the stories of those that can, and have, gives hope to the rest of us.

[ToomuchStuff]

What I fear most is being totally under the autocratic control of other people, with me having zero control and zero possibility of escaping no matter how much I hate what they are doing to me. Examples: nursing home, jail, severe illness where I have to just lay there and let them do whatever they want to.

I think deep down everyone has that fear as their biggest fear, even if they don't admit it.

LOL, I have expected it, most of my life. Nursing home, well my great aunt, that I was the physical carrier for, lived in a nursing home, except for the once a month my grandmother brought her home. (and when my grandmother died, my great aunt kept asking me to kill her)
Jail/prison, well being compared to my uncle so much, I was expected to be a bad seed by family.
Severe illness, asthmatic my whole life, allergies, etc. I saw what happened with my great aunt, (polio), family friends (cancers of various kinds), my grandmother (brain cancer) and being one of her caretakers, parents extended hospital stay, unfortunately I think this is more likely a possibility.

[GeorgeParker]

I think there's a point at which SOME people (saints, mystics and other highly evolved people) can overcome the fear of control. Victor Frankl famously said "The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

That's true. But overcoming your fear of something isn't the same as not being afraid of it. IOW overcoming your fear of unbearable torture doesn't mean you're no longer afraid, it just means you've accepted the fact that this thing is happening and you're able to deal with it unemotionally.

I realize that's a hair-splitting distinction, but it seems to be what the people who have no fear of painful/dangerous things are talking about. For example, the book Full Catastrophe Living https://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastro.../dp/0345536932 is about using meditation and mindfulness to overcome your fear of chronic pain by accepting the pain and looking at it objectively instead of emotionally.

And of course the kind of "overcoming your fear" your talking about is totally different from overcoming body shyness or stage fright or fear of some other harmless thing by gradual exposure to the thing you're afraid of combined with cognitive behavioral methods. In dealing with things that won't actually harm you, your fear really does eventually go away.

[boss mare]

Life never getting back to normal. Even as Delta peaks and covid cases drop everywhere in the US except the Pacific Northwest more and more restrictions are being passed by municipalities in my state. The world has gone stark raving mad.

Please define your definition of the Pacific Northwest... Because those of us who do live in the PNW
, don't claim Idaho, Eastern Washington or Eastern Oregon as the PNW