WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?

author=Dyhalto

author=DorianDawes
If there is a god then he has left this planet to its own inevitable demise eons ago, or perhaps derides a sick enjoyment from watching things he created collapse upon themselves, all the elements necessary to bring about the fall of the human race placed present within us from the very second the first man climbed up out of the dust or the sea.

And yet, rather than having destroyed each other, we've built huge civilizations and our gradual trend of human multiplication and expansion across the world (soon to be worlds) continues.
So much for our "own inevitable demise".

Look at the greatest of these civilizations, and note time and time again, how they have all eventually fallen to ruin, while others spring up in their place. The entire global economy is on the verge of collapse. Nations are at unrest again.

When man is more prone to destruction than creation, how can there be any hope in his future?

i'm scared of having surgery, i have an unnecessary distrust of aneasthesia, and the thought of someone messing around with the inside of my body makes me anxious at best.
something a bit more common would probably be public speaking. i don't mind it while i'm doing it, but the pre-stage nerves make me feel sick.

the only others i can think of are heights and daddylonglegs ha.

author=DorianDawes

author=Dyhalto
But if you see the overall trend, we're making headway. If what you say were true then every time a great civilization fell, we would revert to sticks and stones, hunting and gathering. But instead, technology is advancing, said civilizations are encompassing greater numbers each time, and history continues to progress not without it's roadbumps.
World Peace is actually not that far off. Probably not in our lifetime, but an intuitive person can see where the threads lead.

I wish I could share your optimism friend. I'm not unhappy, as I am quite content with the life I lead and the love I've found, it's just my faith in man has been severely shattered. I want to have hope, but a simple look at the world around me...hell, even things on the internet is enough to make someone wonder where we're going.

You know, world peace is never coming. "when a person's love of power is less than the power of love, the world will know peace", WHEN THE HELL IS THAT EVER GOING TO HAPPEN?

Regarding the world peace subject, take a look at how things stand in North America. Canada and America will never go to war with each other. Most of us have friends or family on the other side of the border and we all tend to do business with each other at some point (eg. manufactured goods or tourism). Through this deep interconnectivity, it's virtually impossible for tensions to rise to such a level that we would turn our weapons on each other. We're like two best-friend neighbours with a fence separating our yards.

The internet stands to take this connectedness to a global level. I have friends in Australia and Sweden. Think I'm going to support a Canadian invasion of Sweden? What will my Aussie friend say if Australia attacks Vancouver? What about your friends and where they live? Hell, just look at the geographical makeup of this site.
Sure, some countries are so digitally backwards, the WWW has no effect on them. Libya, for instance. Others are so tyrannical, contact with the outside world beyond controlled corporate sites is forbidden. China, for instance.
But we're slowly getting there.

My point is, the whole "Humanity is doomed. Why do we even bother?" makes for great artistic theme, but the facts just don't support it.

Back on topic, I'm scared of people thinking I'm some 50 year old perv because I say stuff like what I just did >:( I'm still in my 20's, yo.

We already beat America, no reason to fight again.

I haven't read the topic at all except the last two, but I'm scared of living on the street and having to fend for myself like an animal. Which is probably a common fear seeing as most of us have internet at home (and jorbs).

author=rcholbert
Many of history's wars have been brother against brother. Such personal, individual relationships have not deterred such national hostilities in the past. Often our own desires are subservient to the will of the machine...

But in all of history's wars past, we hadn't had the same communicative or logistic capabilities that we have now. If US Marines blow up the Big Nickel in Ontario, I can log onto RMN and say "cholbert, wtf man". You and I will settle what's what long before television or tomorrow's newspaper can propogate the usual fear and hatred.

That doesn't mean the world isn't full of hostilities. Greece and Turkey still hate each other, for instance. Israel is surrounded by people who want to destroy her. I'm just saying we're getting there.

(Dyhalto)"I'm just saying we're getting there.", this, classically, is called optimism.

My personal fear is driving. I avoid it at almost all cost, and am on my longest streak yet of about three years. It bothers me so much that if I'm a passenger, I prefer to sit in the backseat so I don't have to watch, though I'll use the passenger seat if it's just two of us. I acknowledge that it's irrational, but it doesn't make it any better. This is one of the big reasons I choose to live in the city where mass transit is accessible for day-to-day living.

My biggest fear is the extinction of man. Some day we won't be on Earth anymore and there are only two scenarios for our progeny: they don't exist or they are elsewhere. I don't consider it something so imminently dire that we need to stop everything else and build a launch arcology but actions like nixing the manned space program aren't helpful, and in general I wish modern American culture put more emphasis on science and technology. I am not afraid of the end of the universe itself, because it is (probably) something we can never have any influence on, if such a thing can even occur.

author=Jude
My personal fear is driving. I avoid it at almost all cost, and am on my longest streak yet of about three years. It bothers me so much that if I'm a passenger, I prefer to sit in the backseat so I don't have to watch, though I'll use the passenger seat if it's just two of us. I acknowledge that it's irrational, but it doesn't make it any better. This is one of the big reasons I choose to live in the city where mass transit is accessible for day-to-day living.

It's somewhat similar with me, I fear driving too, but I never even got a driver's license. I was attending driving school (after being persuaded by my family) for like 3 lessons, but I quit. I don't want to drive, I fear it. Being a passenger is bad enough for me, and I also prefer mass transit (trains feel the safest for me). I am also the only one from my family that actually realized that our dog is a passenger too, yet my family never bothered to get the dog a seatbelt. Only after my "talk" with them did they finally get it. Yet they still sometimes don't use it, for various stupid reasons, like "I don't have the time to tie the seatbelt to the dog" or "There isn't enough space in the car, just hold him" or "The seatbelt is in another car".

Our dog is part of our family, I love him, and I don't want anything happen to him (another one of my major fears, and sometimes nightmares, is being there when the dog dies and not being able to prevent it). It's sad that my family obviously doesn't feel the same. I wonder, if they had a baby, would they also not give it a seatbelt for reasons like "I'm in a hurry" or "Just hold him"? I guess not. *sigh*

author=Dyhalto

author=DorianDawes
When I say mankind is doomed, I do not mean that there will come an age in which a full-fledged apocalypse occurs and it is the end of all human life as we know, but that we will gradually lose all those things about ourselves that we once-cherished falling into a darkness where art is dead, individuality successfully squashed by the corporate greed that has so desperately waged war against it. The souls and hearts of man, kindness and love traded away for the approximations of it sold to us in pop songs and Hollywood movies. A world where tabloid celebrities take precedence over children who are brutalized by a government elected to protect and to serve.

I know what you're talking about.
You worry too much. Yes, life's going to get worse for a lot of people in the next decade or two. The GFC isn't over and 'winter' has yet to begin. But the smart will adapt and survive and afterwards proliferate their newfound values, and the sheep will just go die. Humanity goes through these cycles. Hell, part of the reason we have Art is because of this cycle.
Our parents had it good. But you and I and everyone else here (assuming an age of late teens, mid-to-late 20s) were born in an era where we'll have to actually work for a living. I don't mean the 9 to 5 ratrace for 30 years. I mean 10-20% yearly inflation, food shortages, power outages, oppressive government, high crime rates, etc. Great Depression, basically. We'll probably even have WW3.
Knowing what you know should invite less reason to sit around being a mope, and all the more reason to get up and strengthen yourself as a human being. Instead of sitting around saying "They caused this" and "I can't because", go out and educate yourself. The "life you lead and the love you've found" are pretty much counting on your strong shoulders, not your defeatist attitude.

As for the internet; the web is young, and western society is at the height of moral depravity. Let's wait and see how it looks in 2030.

There's a difference between having an attitude of defeatism and confessing a fear.

I go through cycles of bravado and weakness, as we all do. Having a negative view is reasonable so long as there is reason to justify it.

A defeatist attitude would be if I were expressing my own personal miseries or woes, which unlike the rest of the internet, I refuse to share with strangers on a forum. These instead are legitimate concerns that I have, and you are exactly right that it is for these concerns that I do seek to educate myself and create art that attempts to be a light exploding in the face of darkness, bold statements that point at the horrors of today in an attempt to provoke thought and also attempting, however feeble it might be, to try and change one damn thing about this really fucked up society we live in.

I'm sorry, I refuse to sugar-coat the matter. This planet sucks. Humanity sucks. We're terrible creatures who probably don't deserve to live here. We have fleeting moments of redeeming qualities that are easily overshadowed by our immense greed and petty arrogance. We place far too much importance on ourselves in the universe, a universe where entire galaxies are obliterated in a day.

There are those things about us that are redeemable, our capacity to love and create for instance, and these are the things in man that I find most precious because they are the few things that make us worthwhile creatures in a world that does not need us. I hold them very dear to me. I need them to exist, you might say, as desperate and melodramatic as some might see it.

You are right, there is no reason to sit around and mope, as that does nothing but create a self-fulfilling and self-aggrandizing prophecy for those who can sit around and go, "See, I told you so."

I'd rather not be one of those people.

I do what I can.

But in a forum created for expressing our fears, I felt that was not the place to boast of my own endeavors against these things I hate about our world, but instead a thread created to confess what scares us.

What scares me, I will repeat are not any of the aforementioned phobias discussed here, but our own downfall, and that downfall is not in the wiping out of mankind, but in the sacrifice of our souls and humanity on the altars of greed and progress.

It is not all the time a truly legitimate fear, but it does lurk there in the back of my mind. It has kept me up at night, the same as the fear of a prowler might have kept you up at night, or some other thing.

Some fears are silly, some are not.

None of us really have the right to judge someone else's fears as we are all wired differently, and what might be terrifying and earth-shattering for some, might be trivial and petty to another, and we're all in a race to legitimize ourselves to each other, because deep down we're all terrified, insecure, vulnerable motherfuckers.