Skydiving
Yes, the first few times are intimidating. Hence why most students do their first few jumps tandem and then with a Jump Master after that.
After that though, you’ll be looking out the window of the plane and seeing just how much air there is to play in. As you gain experience, you will internalize the fact you’re safer in free fall, than you are on the airplane.
It’s not the free fall that I’m worried about. It’s what comes after.
Minorities.
Trees
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no joke, I have root-phobia. It’s weird.
Seeing plant roots or imagining touching them gives me shudders.
I have no problem with carrots or potatoes, funnily enough (although the latter is turning into phobia territory if they are starting to bud)
My suspicion on how I got it: As a small kid (3 or so years old) I remember having some nightmares about tree roots grabbing me by my feet. Must have wired some things in my brain in a weird way
This can’t be real
it sure is. brains are weird
Public speaking. I’ve seen surveys where more people are afraid of speaking in front of an audience than they are of dying, which is utterly insane. For the vast, vast majority of scenarios where you might find yourself speaking to a group of people, the risk level is very low. Likewise, in the vast majority of cases, few people are likely to remember much about your performance. It’s just talking.
Well I mean dying is a one time thing. However if you do badly at public speaking you will never hear the end of it. And if you do good they might ask you to do it again.
Can you imagine waking up at 3am and remembering how you said “Salvia” instead of “saliva” in your dissertation?! And it’s been 10 years since, but you KNEW you just outed your habits to the whole audience and your professors?!
Edit: Death is a sweet release you never have to remember, not like the above.
I think most people just think of Sage in general when they hear salvia.
I’ve a dozen perfectly innocent salvia species and many varietals of each growing in my water-wise garden. When people ask what I’ve got growing and I say “mainly salvias” no one has ever assumed I was farming psychedelics.
I disagree, but this may say more about me than other people. Unless you’re a gardener or botonist, sage = sage and salvia = salvia divinorum.
Cities
However, entering or exiting cities is a legit nightmare.
Chicago especially
Needles.
You’ve never had someone miss before, have you?
I think mine is animalistic fear of damaging yourself. I’m fine, I sit down and act nonchalant. I’ll talk and look at the person or them doing it. But, under that is my skin getting clammy and breaking out in a light sweat…
Totally normal reaction, I mean it isn’t normal to let someone else put metal inside your own body, I get that little sweat too sometimes when the needle goes in. But I wouldn’t say scary.
Math, Haskell, and software engineering in general.
Haskell isn’t scary, it’s just redundant.
Ending capitalism to embrace a system where we end poverty, consumerism and discriminations.
I’ve always suspected people conflate communism with dictators, which is the main cause of distrust for anything anti-capitalism.
Are there any examples of a nation successfully transitioning out of capitalism without ending up in a dictatorship? I want to believe it can be done, but I have no idea what it would look like.
Have a day off.
The only people who are truly afraid of this are the few wealthy who stand to lose 80% of their enormous wealth that they will never use in their lifetime.
You really think that the only ones against ending capitalism are a handful of wealthy people?
If only. You forgot how people are afraid to help others who came from an other country. Most of people want equality but only with their superiors. And people are afraid to change their lifestyle to a more ecological one.
Children in horror movies, like when they say creepy things or sometimes smile when something horrible is happening.
Dude, just kick that kid like a football.
I used to be so scared of Chucky. Now I wonder what the max distance I could punt his ass is
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B-but you see, the kid was CURSED!
Oh, never mind then!
Asking someone out on a date.
I had social anxiety for years, so I probably struggled with this more than most. But it’s surprisingly easy. And more often than not, if your instincts are that that person likes you, you’re usually right.
if your instincts are that that person likes you, you’re usually right.
They’re not talking about you and i, dear reader.
Dying. If it’s so scary, then why does everybody do it?
I plan on skipping, so you might want to change it to almost everybody.
I’ve died zero times thus far and don’t see why it should change.
!remindme 10 years
Thanks to denial, I’m inmortal
Thanks to denial I’m so many other things, you wouldn’t even believe!
Live forever or die trying
“Death gotta be easy, cause life is hard” - Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent
Hey, more than 6% of people haven’t died. Not everybody does it.
Give em time. They’ll come around.
Jokes aside, it’s the pain of dying that’s scary, not the idea of being dead.
The sun imploding in the next few billions years. I’ve had conversations about that that I could see in the person’s eyes that they were getting really scared about it.
Doesn’t it expand into a red giant and envelop the earth first? Make them even more uneasy with that!
The eventual annihilation of our species casts a shadow over everything we do. Because we’re ultimately working for something temporary, which will be followed by ultimate death and infinite silence.
There’s absolutely no way we make it the next billion years without either dying out or spreading past the solar system.
Yep. Our destiny is space or annihilation.
Root canals. The procedure has come a long way since the 90s and is relatively smooth and painless now. Obviously having a good and skillful edodontist also helps, but it’s no longer excruciating like decades ago.
Currently having to deal with finding an endodontist that does retreats, so finding a good one in the first place is the pain.
The procedure itself is whatever.
But I am on Xanax when they do they, otherwise I’m not allowed inside a dentist office.
Can confirm. The pain kept me awake the night before my appointment, so I was quite tired while having my canals filled. As soon as the dentist had given me a couple of anesthetic shots, I had to struggle to stay awake. I felt nothing during the procedure, and the only pain after was in my wallet.
99.9% of every horror movie, which should be renamed jump annoyances, tada
Or the other category of horror, “that’s gross”
Living in the Matrix. If you do what they want, you get to taste steak.
Maybe we could give the ‘everyone is happy’ setting another spin? Having lived this timeline, I feel we might have given up on that one a bit too soon…
The Matrix posits that the late 90s were the peak of human civilization. Given what’s happened in this millennium so far, I think I’m inclined to agree.
If you weren’t born into being one of those poors.
