The dark destination

May 2019; Joshua Tree National Park

For a long time I was unable to reconcile two simple facts. First, nearly everyone I know from childhood has an anxiety diagnosis¹. Second, modern society is safer than any human society has likely ever been. Death and disease are distant horizons; I have the impression that most people in my social circles have never even encountered a corpse, except possibly in the sanitized context of a funeral. Torture, combat, and starvation, those horrific staples of the past, are completely absent from our daily lives. So it has always confused me:

How is it that nearly everyone in one of the most stable and materially abundant civilizations of all time has anxiety, yet the nomads of the northern Sahara can spend their lives tracking from oasis to oasis, never knowing if the next has run dry?²

In this post, I explore this question, and try to elucidate the nature of fear.

A few years ago; a sunny afternoon in June. I was sitting on the couch in my apartment. My sole roommate was visiting family, so I had the place to myself. I was munching on some toast and reading an article when I heard screaming from the street below. I look out the window; a man stands on the far sidewalk, hunched oddly, surrounded by passersby who are leaning away from him, as if in the preliminary stages of deciding whether or not to run. I can’t see the man’s face. His ongoing screams have a strange, truncated quality. He turns towards my building and begins to stumble across the empty street. It is then that I notice that he is clutching his chest, in a futile effort to dam the blood that gushes out with such vigor that it sprays up through the collar of his t-shirt, which I now realize was not originally red. The screams cease; he collapses, facedown, directly beneath my window. Behind him a trail of tomato-colored splotches stretches across the avenue. The ambulance arrives; the police arrive; the ambulance leaves. Stabbed in the lung, I found out later, and pronounced dead at the scene.

What shocked me about witnessing a murder³ was primarily the fact that I was untroubled by it. I did not develop a fear of going outside. I did not have nightmares about the dead man’s screams. The dried bloodstains remained on the street for months afterward and I felt nothing in particular upon seeing them except—oh yeah, that happened. I even considered renewing my lease, and when I decided not to, it was because I wanted to travel instead. The stabbing was just something that happened one afternoon; a memory, if a particularly vivid one, among many.

Here’s another story. When I was in college I drove many thousands of miles in a car with a little flashing light on the dashboard indicating that the airbags had failed. Once, I was stopped at the traffic light on Sepulveda before the on-ramp to the 405, driving home at the end of the school year. My light turned green, and suddenly a truck ran the transverse red and barreled through the intersection. The lifted Ford F-150 completed an illegal left turn less than five feet from the front bumper of my beautiful red ‘91 Mazda Miata. I was fortunate that I had been daydreaming about the girl I had just said goodbye to, and took an extra second to put the car in gear. You don’t need crash test dummies to find out what happens when a five-thousand-pound pickup truck hits a tiny convertible with no airbags. But—this experience did not rattle me either. During the five-hour drive home, I barely thought about what had happened; I continued to drive the car for years afterwards.

And one more story—the subject of the post Mind and mountain, so I’ll summarize—last year I crossed a snow bridge over a crevasse on Mt. Shasta, and learned from people who descended after us that it melted and fell less than half an hour later. I was among the last people to cross it. Unlike the other two events, this one properly scared me. I have not touched an ice axe since that trip.

In the car, I think that flashing light in the dash, the airbag warning indicator, is what made the difference. It reminded me every time I started the engine: you’re not safe here. There was never any pretense. I knew the whole time that driving that car amounted to risking my life and I did it anyway.

It was the same with the murder; I had been followed around many times by aggressive homeless people, and occasionally heard gunshots in the night. I knew multiple people who had been threatened with violence or mugged. The idea that a stabbing would occur on a busy street in broad daylight was surprising, but not unbelievable, and didn’t really change my assessment of how dangerous the area was. It only happened once in the year I lived there, after all.

On the mountain, though, the snow bridge looked unstable at first glance. It was a conglomeration of slabs of hardened snow wedged vertically between rock and the glacier, maintaining its precarious form through the apparent lenience of the rising sun. I was extremely reluctant to cross it. However, there were many people on the mountain that day, and each person ahead of me shuffled across with little hesitation. I took this to mean that my fear was a symptom of inexperience, and that the bridge was stable. I swallowed the fear, convinced myself that I was safe, and crossed while avoiding the gaze of the dark emptiness below.

With these experiences in mind, the answer to the original question is simple: fear is not an indicator of estimated danger. Rather, fear is the awareness of the intolerable. I had already learned to tolerate the idea of a serious car crash or being attacked on the street, because both outcomes were obviously possible, though unlikely. But falling into that crevasse was absolutely unthinkable; I could not continue climbing without convincing myself that there was no such risk. To later learn that it nearly happened was one of the most acutely disturbing experiences of my life.

I believe each thought is like a melody—each thought seeks resolution. Finding resolution entails the thorough exploration of the thought’s implications and associations, following the threads linking it to identities, memories, sensations, desires, and the future. The existence of intolerable thoughts obstructs this process, replacing comprehension with fear; and since such thoughts are often suppressed from conscious awareness, the fear feels vague and permeating. This is anxiety.

The elimination of fear therefore turns out to be relatively straightforward. When a thought arises, follow every implication to its final conclusion. Savor each unpleasant thought, memory, and worry. Don’t panic.

1. Except for me! I refused to seek help!

2. from my post Desire machine

3. Technically, I didn’t witness the murder itself—I never saw the culprit or the knife. I looked outside only after the man started screaming.