The Other Side of Fear

The Relationship Between Fear and Fiction

Karen Thompson Walker did a phenomenal job presenting a case on Ted Talks, explaining what fear can teach us by using the historical event of the Essex Shipwreck.

During the 1820s, a captain and a team of 20 sailors shipped across the Pacific when a sperm whale attacked the boat, essentially sinking it.

In reaction to the emergency state, the 20 crew members split up into three small boats with little food or resources left.

They had to make the ultimate choice between three options:

The nearest island was 1200 miles away — yet they had heard that the island was populated by Cannibals.

The second option was Hawaii, in which the season threatened heavy storms, and the dangers were fatal.

The third option was the longest in time, where they would need to sail 150 miles in hopes of meeting strong winds and being pushed closer to North America.

However, this option seemed just as threatening as the men knew their food supplies would not last throughout the journey.

In other words, the captain and the team had to choose between being eaten, dying from a threatening climate, and starving to death. The beautiful twist Karen gave to this perspective is that instead of calling such options fears, we should change them to stories.

Karen explains that fears and story-telling have the same components.

There are characters in a story. In our fears, we are the main characters.

In a story there is a plot just like in fears, where we envision them having a beginning, middle, and end.

All great stories also have suspense, which correspond to what fear is all about- what will happen next?

Fears functions in the same way as fictional works.

Our fears typically show us that one thing leads to the next.

As humans have too many fears throughout their lives, the real question is how do we distinguish between the fears we listen to, and the fears we should ignore?

It is essentially impossible to prepare for every single one of our fears — as much as we try.

We can answer this question, by knowing the end of what happens to the Essex Ship crew members.

The men had finally made a decision.

They embarked on their journey to South America, where after two months at sea (as predicted), they ran out of food. Less than half of the men were kept alive, and some even reformed to their own methods of Cannibalism.

Talk about irony.

Why do you think these men dreaded cannibals more than the thought of starving to death?

Why didn’t both scenarios have the same value?

Why are we swayed by one story over another?

Many novelists across the world actually claimed that readers have two types of temperaments: The artistic inclination and the scientific.

When reading stories, we tend to imagine the characters and scenes, while using our scientific side to make judgments and predict possible outcomes.

The problem with the crew members in comparison, is that they listened to the wrong story.

They only focused on the artistic part of the story, where they imagined cannibals eating them.

Their imagination took over their logic.

Out of all the options or “narratives”, they only responded to the vivid one (being eaten by cannibals) which drove them to eliminate such an option.

If they had only chosen to use their scientific side, or proper judgement in measuring their fears/stories, they would have chosen a less violent and rational route — the one that would take less time.

If we all tried to read our fears correctly, then maybe we would actually exterminate fears of serial killers, plane crashes, heights, and spiders.

Instead, we would be concerned with subtler issues — plaque building up in our lungs (smokers, stop smoking!), malnutrition, or perhaps global warming.

If we read our fears properly, it can offer us something far more precious — The ability to accept what we cannot control, and improve what is actually in our hands.

As a personal reaction to this video, I was pleasantly surprised with the way Karen connected our fears to the architecture of stories.

We do indeed have the ability to choose the fears that may “dominate us” and actually change our perceptions of the story.

Does one thing really lead to another? Or is it our irrational, artistic self showing off?

Do the fears we go crazy about really exist, or is it only powerful because we can imagine it?

I’ll give you some time to think about that.