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I think there are two types of fear mostly, the innate survival animalistic fear and the self-perpetuating fear caused due to misunderstanding. The animalistic fear is present in all and it's not possible to get rid of. When you see a snake or a tiger in front of you, that fear is natural. The response is to jump or run and is so spontaneous, you can't really control it. It's necessary for survival. But I think we are interested in the other fear, the one that is bound to attachment. You see a tiger, you panic, turns out to be a cat, you laugh it off, go away, that fear is not an issue. But if you go about your day thinking, what if that was a tiger? What if I get jumped by tiger this time? Then, you are creating the fear. The fear has no basis, except for it was implanted to you awhile ago. And now you are attaching yourself to it. You are extending it which is the actual problem. Most of us have fears that go back to childhood. If you think back far enough(like the tiger example), question yourself why you are afraid, you know the answers.

One more example, I used to be afraid of getting heart-attacks in the past. Even gas passing would make me panic. Have I ever had a heart-attack before? No. How am I so damn sure that I have a heart-attack if I don't even know what it's supposed to feel like? Heart-attack is a bad thing and it shouldn't be happening to me. How is every acid reflux a heart-attack to me now. I have created my own bubble of fear. When though? I sure as hell didn't know what heartattack is when I was born. So it happened when I was able to comprehend what a heart-attack is right? For me, it's due to people around me passing, it's due to reading on Internet about young celebrities dying to strokes, watching movies, etc. It got implanted in me. I don't know a heartattack I just have an idea of it which is not the same thing. Not even remotely related.

Fear arises due to misunderstanding. If you trace it far back enough, fear was implanted mostly in the childhood.


I once had a small fleet of SSDs fail because they had some uptime counters that overflowed after 4.5 years, and that somehow persistently wrecked some internal data structures. It turned them into little, unrecoverable bricks.

It was not awesome seeing a bunch of servers go dark in just about the order we had originally powered them on. Not a fun day at all.


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